SUMMARY

This interview of Sanford Kwinter, writer and architectural theorist, investigates his early inspirations abroad and how that influenced his career. Growing up in Canada, Kwinter was exposed to culture through jazz clubs in Toronto, which amplified his desire to become more immersed in culture. Later, Kwinter studied at the Collège de France, where he attended numerous Foucault seminars. He moved to New York, where he studied Comparative Literature at Columbia with people like Sylvère Lotringer and Edward Said. Searching to develop his ideas further, Kwinter and his friends created the publication, Zone magazine, which aimed to further the discussion around art in the context of the history and philosophy of science and a new kind of materialism. Kwinter was also active in the debate between language-based and materialist modes of theory at the IAUS in the 1990s. He has since written books such as Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (MIT Press, 2001), Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Actar, 2008), and Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium (Actar, 2010). Throughout his career, Kwinter has emphasized the value of creating intellectual communities and exploring many various disciplines and how they relate to architecture.