SUMMARY

The interview traces Irina Davidovici’s family background in socialist Bucharest, Romania, with Jewish middle-class roots, cultural exposure to music and opera, and standard education emphasizing English and French. It highlights her early writing passion, entry into architecture for social appeal, and studies at Bucharest’s Ion Mincu Institute (studio-focused), Nottingham (French theory), and University of North London (site analysis, minimalism). It emphasizes her PhD at Cambridge on phenomenology, shift to housing history and urban ideology at ETH Zurich, roles directing doctoral programs and archives, and views on architectural theory’s evolution from insular phenomenology to pluralist, socially engaged discourses connecting past and present.