In this interview, Diana Agrest recounts her upbringing in Buenos Aires in a family of Eastern European immigrants, her bilingual education, and her entry into architectural studies at sixteen. Influenced by modern art, music, and travel, particularly a 1960s trip to the United States that introduced her to Frank Lloyd Wright and American cities, she studied in Argentina during the culturally vibrant period preceding military rule. In Paris in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she engaged with structuralism, semiotics, linguistics, and critical theory, including the work of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. These influences shaped her interest in urban form, public space, signification, and ideology, as well as her critique of modernist functionalism. Agrest also discusses bringing European theory to New York through the IAUS, Princeton, and Cooper Union, co-founding journals, and developing a critical urban discourse that emphasized complexity, representation, and politics over style.