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Michael Hirschbichler (1983 born in Graz, Austria) studied architecture at ETH Zurich and philosophy at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He is the founder of ATELIER HIRSCHBICHLER, a Zurich-based practice working on the threshold of architecture, art and research and thus combining the realms of architectural design and production, speculative-critical artistic investigations and theoretical reasoning and writing. Michael Hirschbichler received numerous scholarships and awards. Besides running ATELIER HIRSCHBICHLER he is also involved in teaching and research. He was an assistant at ETH Zurich, the director of the architecture program at the Papua New Guinean University of Technology as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the Architectural Heritage Center of Papua Neu Guinea. He currently holds a lecturer position for architectural design at ETH Zurich.
Michael Hirschbichler works at the nexus of art and architecture. His works are a reflection of various aspects of contemporary life which manifest themselves in the planned and constructed world through architectural situations and structures determined by urban planning. In his work on these themes Michael Hirschbichler considers plans, photo collages, paintings and models to be tools of a speculative-critical archeology, by means of which layers of reality can be laid bare and existing tendencies of reality given expression. Using these media he studies, manipulates and assembles architectural-spatial fragments, forming them into dystopic spaces which are exaggerated to absurd extremes through scaling, repetition, contrasts and alienation. Between the soberness of everyday functional spaces and the excessive sculptural style of grand, representational buildings, in his works a view of reality as a built form emerges that makes it possible to witness the existential drama of deliberately shaped and contested space hidden beneath its apparent obj undefined