Born in Berlin, Ernst studied architecture at TU Berlin and ETH Zurich. Followed by several internships, he gained academic experience at the chair of Prof. Ute Frank at TU Berlin, collaborated on several publications at ETH and was a researcher at the FutureCitiesLab in Singapore in 2012, a teaching assistant for the chair of Gramazio Kohler at ETH and Prof. Georg Augustin at University of Kassel. He currently teaches a 1st year Master´s studio at DIA Dessau and holds the Chair of Excellence Adalberto Libera as a visiting professor at the University of Trento. He was recently awarded the Villa Massimo Rome grant in 2019 with his colleagues from FAKT, the architecture office he co-founded in 2013. His interests span academic research and practice, culminating in fabrication, rule-based design, and urbanism; presently exploring the problems and potentials of today’s global mass production, its norms and standards, and their respective relationship to architecture.