Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius is a performing architect, a hybrid between space designer and situation maker. As such in 2021, he won the golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennial with his collective raumlaborberlin. His work stands emblematic for an approach to architecture and urbanity that manifests a radical turn from a practice that serves the real estate market and the building industry towards a practice that plays a lead role in all current struggles and debates around a changing climate, sustainability, shrinking material resources and creating futures with all lifeforms on this planet. Foerster-Baldenius strives for transdiciplinary approaches in learning, making, and doing, he is a brilliant researcher, networker, and charismatic fighter for new forms of resilient urban practice. With him Städelschule will install a laboratory for cohabitation with the city of Frankfurt as its first and foremost testing ground.
Foerster-Baldenius has studied architecture at TU and HdK Berlin and the Royal Danish Academy of Arts in Copenhagen. He plans, draws and realizes installations and interventions in public space, makes scenographies, and dramaturgies for stages, squares and exhibitions and develops event and teaching formats. During the pandemic he realized, among other things, the construction of the Sommerbau for Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt and the Third Space for the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus as two temporary open spaces for analogue encounter.
He has won the Schelling Prize for Innovation in Architecture with his early work Hotel Neustadt and since then designed and produced, displayed, published and performed worldwide with growing attention. He has been a Professor at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design Prague (VSUP), the Folkwang University of Arts Essen, the Royal Academy of Arts in the Hague and has worked in teaching positions in many other European Universities. He is also the founder, dean and board member of the Floating University an award-winning Nature/Culture learning Space in Berlin.