This interview traces Irina Davidovici’s family background in socialist Bucharest, Romania. Raised in a middle-class Jewish family, she was exposed to music and opera and received an education emphasizing English and French. Davidovici developed an early passion for writing and entered architecture partly because of its social appeal. She studied at Bucharest’s Ion Mincu Institute, with its studio-centered curriculum, before encountering French theory at Nottingham and approaches to site analysis and minimalism at the University of North London.
Davidovici completed her Ph.D. at Cambridge on phenomenology before shifting toward housing history and urban ideology at ETH Zurich. The interview also addresses her roles in directing doctoral programs and archives. She reflects on architectural theory’s evolution from the relatively insular phenomenological discourse of her early education toward more pluralistic and socially engaged approaches that connect historical research with contemporary concerns.