This interview traces Brett Steele’s education and career across architectural practice, publishing, and academic leadership. After studying art and architecture on the West Coast and at the Architectural Association, he worked with Zaha Hadid and later co-founded the AA Design Research Lab. Steele discussed directing the Architectural Association and AA Publications, as well as developing collaborative and digitally oriented models of architectural education. The interview also reflects on architectural theory’s evolution from the critical and postmodern discourses of the 1970s to the digital and pragmatic shifts of the 1990s. Steele emphasized negotiation, appropriation, networked collaboration, and distributed expertise as important approaches within increasingly pluralistic architectural and educational contexts.