SUMMARY

This interview traces Aaron Betsky’s family background as student with radical roots, his education in the Netherlands and at Yale (humanities then architecture), and early career in journalism and teaching at Cincinnati. It highlights his influences from Vincent Scully, material culture, and phenomenology, his work with Frank Gehry, and curatorial leadership at SFMOMA, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and Cincinnati Art Museum. It emphasizes his outsider perspective, promotion of Dutch experimental design, views on landscape as artifact, and reflections on architectural theory’s evolution from 1970s postmodernism to 2000s deconstructivism, favoring emergence from everyday life over imposed order.