Diana Agrest is considered today as the most important woman architect of international stature in Argentina. She graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in 1967. In 1970, she joined Mario Gandelsonas (1938) in the new architectural semiology workshop founded by her teacher, César Jannello (1918-1985), a pioneer in the research on the relationship between linguistics, semiotics and structuralism in architecture. In 1971, she began an uninterrupted career in New York, combining teaching, theoretical research, projects and constructions. She was first a lecturer at Princeton University (1974), then joined the IAUS (Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies) directed by Peter Eisenman (1932) – which became an important international reference. In 1975, she invited Aldo Rossi (1931-1997) and his idea of an “Analogue City” linking the history of cities and their contemporary conception through urban typology and morphology. In 1978, she directed workshops, research and studies in various prestigious universities in the United States, Argentina and France and developed a method according to which architecture is produced as a transformation linked to a “reading” of the city, thus approached from various points of view, producing multiple meanings. In 1980, she founded an agency with M. Gandelsonas and designed numerous projects, including several housing complexes and master plans for family housing complexes, as well as interior design projects in various countries in Europe, Asia and America. She began publishing critical essays as early as 1970, including several co-written with M. Gandelsonas, on structuralism and semiotics, building a personal approach which poses, in humanistic and gendered terms, the architectural problems raised by urban lifestyles and social behaviours. In “Architecture from Without: Theoretical Framings for a Critical Practice” (1991), which has received international acclaim, she analyses the condition of women in architectural theory, excluded because they “do not belong to the symbolic order”, a point of view that is not an acknowledgement of failure for her, as she explains in “The Sex of Architecture” (1996). She has also shown interest in the relationship between cinema and urban architecture and has been working on a film project on the IAUS for years. Having received numerous awards and distinctions, she directs projects around the world, from the United States to China and France, involving development plans, public parks and buildings.
