SUMMARY

This interview of Hilde Heynen explores her path to becoming an architectural theorist. Heynen grew up in Belgium in a middle-class family where higher education was deeply valued, with her mother being a pharmacist and her father a secondary school sports teacher. She continued this trajectory by attending a girls’ secondary school where she studied Latin and Greek before passing the rigorous engineering entrance exam at KU Leuven. She undertook a parallel degree in philosophy, graduating with both in 1981 and 1982, with theses on postmodernism that bridged the two disciplines. A presentation at a 1989 Zurich symposium on Giedion connected her to Sanford Anderson and Michael Hays, opening doors to MIT and eventually Assemblage, where she published alongside Hays and Beatriz Colomina. Throughout the interview, Heynen argues that architectural theory retains its relevance because it keeps broader social, political, and philosophical questions at the center of architectural education.