SUMMARY

The interview traces Brett Steele’s high middle-class Dutch family background, with an artist father (dean in Rotterdam) and homemaker mother interested in architecture, fostering cultural exposure to museums, buildings, and artists via 1% art rule. It highlights his early architectural drawings, Delft education influenced by Rossi and Koolhaas, OMA work, and PhD on diagrams. It emphasizes his AA London directorship (2005–2017), founding AA Publications and Log journal, USC teaching, and reflections on theory’s evolution from 1970s critical/postmodern discourses (Tafuri, Lefebvre) to 1990s digital/pragmatic shifts, advocating negotiation, appropriation, and diagrammatic methods in pluralist contexts.