In this interview, Preston Scott Cohen discussed his upbringing, education, and architectural career. Growing up in North Carolina, he developed an early interest in architecture through downtown Asheville. At the Rhode Island School of Design, he engaged with debates between modernism and postmodernism and studied with Judith Wolin, Rodolfo Machado, and K. Michael Hays, while developing an interest in Robert Venturi’s work. Cohen described his early houses of the 1980s as shaped by tensions among constraints, often expressed through asymmetrical façades. His time in Rome was also formative. Analyzing the Palazzo del Te deepened his interest in architecture’s inherent problems and the ways architects respond to them, concerns that later informed both his work and teaching. Cohen continued his education at the Harvard GSD, where he encountered the work of Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenman and the intellectual culture surrounding the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. As an educator, he emphasized real-world conditions, the analysis of constraints, and architecture’s status as a discipline.