Sben Korsh is an educator, historian and curator focused on buildings, landscapes, and political economy.
Over the past five years, Korsh has researched spaces of financial work — like individual office buildings or entire financial districts — in global cities such as New York, London, Hong Kong and San Francisco. From 2014-16, Korsh lived in the Bay Area and wrote a masters thesis on the architectural history of the Transamerica Pyramid; he is now organizing this work into a future exhibition and catalog that will examine the building’s corporate history, controversial design and backlash, and how it today has become quintessential to the San Francisco skyline. Between 2017-19, he lived in Hong Kong and examined the history of finance and its relationship to Hong Kong’s political economy; this work is currently being revised into a book project, “The Architecture of Stock Exchanges in Hong Kong: Design of a Free Market.” As the 2018-19 Emerging Curator at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montréal, Korsh organized the multimedia research project, Market Landscape: Between Financial Districts and the Planet. This work was made collaboratively with the staff at CCA and Maxime Decaudin, a PhD Candidate in Art History at the Sorbonne Université in Paris.
Outside of research, Korsh has engaged in editing and curating as a means of organizing around pressing social issues, including co-editing volumes for the Architecture Lobby and the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, assisting on architectural exhibitions at the City Gallery of Hong Kong, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute for Public Architecture in New York, and UC Berkeley’s Wurster Gallery, and regularly organizing directly with other workers as part of the Architecture Lobby at the local and international level.
Korsh has assisted in teaching courses for undergraduate and masters students on architecture theory, professional ethics, spaces of incarceration, and the history of capitalism.
He holds a BA from the City University of New York, an MS from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MPhil from the University of Hong Kong, all in the history and theory of architecture.