K. Michael Hays
Biographical interview
SUMMARY
This interview surveys the career of architectural theorist K. Michael Hays, beginning with his upbringing in the American South. It follows his architectural education at Georgia Tech and his graduate studies in history, theory, and criticism at MIT, where he later completed his Ph.D. Hays began teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1980 before being recruited to Princeton by Dean Robert Maxwell and later to the Harvard Graduate School of Design by Rafael Moneo.
The interview considers Hays’s central role in architectural theory, including his founding of Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture, which published forty-one issues between 1986 and 2000. It also addresses his influential anthology Architectural Theory since 1968 (1998), which helped give coherence to the theoretical debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Hays’s intellectual trajectory began with the Frankfurt School and German modernism before turning increasingly toward Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and its relevance to neo-avant-garde figures including Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Bernard Tschumi.
The interview considers Hays’s central role in architectural theory, including his founding of Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture, which published forty-one issues between 1986 and 2000. It also addresses his influential anthology Architectural Theory since 1968 (1998), which helped give coherence to the theoretical debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Hays’s intellectual trajectory began with the Frankfurt School and German modernism before turning increasingly toward Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and its relevance to neo-avant-garde figures including Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Bernard Tschumi.
BIOGRAPHY
Michael Hays is Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He was born on October 18, 1952. He received the Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1976. From MIT he received the Master of Architecture degree in Advanced Studies in 1979, and the Doctor of Philosophy in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art in 1990. He was the founder of the scholarly journal Assemblage, which was a leading forum of discussion of architectural theory in North America and Europe. From 1995 to 2000.
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