SUMMARY

In this Interview Diana Agrest recounts her Buenos Aires upbringing with Eastern European immigrant roots, bilingual education, and early start in architecture at age 16. Influenced by modern art, music, and travels (especially 1960s U.S. trip discovering Wright and urban America), she studied in Argentina during a vibrant pre-military period. In Paris (late 1960s/early 1970s), she engaged structuralism, semiotics, linguistics, and critical theory (Barthes, Kristeva), shaping her focus on urban form, public space, signification, and ideology in architecture. She critiques modernist functionalism, brings European theory to New York (IAUS, Princeton, Cooper Union), co-founds journals, and develops a critical urban discourse emphasizing complexity, representation, and politics over style.