SUMMARY

This interview investigates David Theodore’s intellectual path into architecture. He grew up in a small town called Manitoba, which is notable for its 17 different churches and a strong rural work ethic. After time in private boarding schools in Winnipeg, where he took more interest in music and basketball than academics, he left formal education as a teenager, though he would return later to university. His first degree was in English literature at McGill, where he studied with professor Mike Bristol and wrote an honors thesis on John Donne through the lens of Foucault’s idea of the author function. During this time, the ideas of post structuralism and deconstructivism were leaving the English department that Theodore was once a part of and entering architecture. Theodore then enrolled into the B.Arch and M.Arch programs at McGill. There, he worked closely with Annmarie Adams as a long-term research assistant, helping on projects about the history of hospital design in Canada and their modernization through privatization. This collaboration introduced him to teams of medical historians and scientists, which in turn led him toward science and technology studies and ultimately a PhD at Harvard under Peter Galison and Antoine Picon. At McGill, Theodore also studied under Alberto Perez-Gomez, absorbing but critiquing his approaches. His essay “The Content and Craft: What Do We Do When We Do the History of Architecture?”, reflects his insistence on methodological precision, attention to sources, and skepticism toward universalizing claims in architectural historiography.