Dr Philipp R.W. URECH

Senior Researcher of Resilient Blue-Green Infrastructures

Philipp RW Urech is an architect and senior researcher at the Future Cities Lab Global in Zurich. He holds degrees in architecture from the Academy of Architecture (USI) in Mendrisio and from ETH Zurich. He contributed to numerous projects in both architectural and landscape design, including building submissions, planning studies and competitions. In 2021 he founded his firm Topostudio for urban landscape design and for consultancy in digital modelling.

Philipp upholds an equal inclusion of creativity and science in designing places of cultural, ecological, functional and poetic meaning. His research investigates how physical form and dynamic systems of the environment stand in a reciprocal influence, with the intention to develop site-specific and resilient design solutions. To this end, he attained expertise in digital modelling capable of extending the heterogeneity of the physical landscape from the detail to the territorial scale, and of synthesizing the holistic complex of topography, water, climate and soil that dominate the anthropogenic environment. His doctoral thesis “Shaping Physical Landscape” devises a design methodology based on innovative 3D modelling techniques that gives designers new means to study and interact with the form of the environment.

Since 2010, Philipp is lecturer and research associate at the chair of Landscape Architecture of Professor Christophe Girot at ETH Zurich's Department of Architecture. He taught landscape and urban design in master’s studios, thesis projects and postgraduate study programs. Philipp was a guest lecturer and teacher in parallel programs at the ETH Zurich, NUS Singapore, Technion in Haifa and UCLouvain. He also led design research studios at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) while conducting doctoral research at the Singapore-ETH Centre in Singapore. He is currently dedicated to the project Resilient Blue-Green Infrastructures at the Future Cities Lab Global in Zurich, which includes research and teaching assignments.