SUMMARY

This interview covers the full career of the architectural theorist K. Michael Hays. It addresses early years growing up in the south background from 1952 to 1971. It covers his education including his Bachelor of Architecture degree at Georgia Tech from 1971 to 1976, his Masters degree in History, Theory and Criticism at MIT from 1977 to 1979 and his Ph.D (also at MIT) from 1984-1990. The interview discusses Hays’s teaching career which began at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1980. After being head hunted by the then Dean of Princeton Robert Maxwell, Hays moved to Princeton University where he became an assistant professor. And after being head hunted again by the then Chair of Architecture at the GSD Raphael Moneo, Hays moved to the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he remained. Hays has been a centrally important figure in the field of architectural theory throughout his career. He founded the journal Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture which ran in 41 issues from 1986 to 2000. He edited the important anthology of architectural theory, Architectural Theory Since 1968, published in 1998, which gave shape and coherence to the development of architectural theory in the 1970s and 1980s. While he began with an intellectual passion for the theories of the Frankfurt School and their application to German modenism, he moved increasingly towards the post-structuralist pyschoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and its applicability to some of the key the neo-avant-gardes of the 1970s: Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk and Bernard Tschumi.