Kollhoff spent the first six years of his life on the family farm in Thuringia at the southern tip of the newly established DDR.
[3] Then with a scholarship from the DAAD to attend Cornell University, Kollhoff studied, alongside Rem Koolhaas, amongst the stimulating atmosphere prompted by the academic rivalry between architectural historian Colin Rowe and architect and theorist Oswald Mathias Ungers.
Until 1985, he was an assistant at the HdK (Berlin University of the Arts), and until 2012, Kollhoff was Professor of Architecture and Construction at the ETH Zürich.
Since 2004 Kollhoff leads the "Bauakademie" project, whose goal is to reconstruct the Karl Friedrich Schinkel building, Berlin 1836, which was demolished in 1962.
In 2005 he constructed the inner rooms of the exclusive night club Goya on Nollendorfplatz, that opened on December 1 in the building where the Metropol had formerly been.
[9] His most known projects in the country however were built in Rotterdam: both the Statendam high-rise tower at the Binnenrotte and the Compagnie residential buildings at the Kop van Zuid stand out in their respective area's.