Diana Agrest

Diana I. Agrest (born 1945) is a practicing architect and urban designer and a theorist architecture and urban design theorist, in New York City.

From the beginning of her career, while still a student, she started developing critical work on urban discourse as a result of the inefficiency of the existing urban design theories and models, and her need to find alternative ways to think about the city in relation to her practice. As a result, she developed critical work, both in theory and practice alternatively. She was on the forefront of a poststructuralist approach as a tool for critically re-thinking architecture, and particularly the city and Urbanism.

Agrest is a full-time, tenured Professor of Architecture at the irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.

She was a full-time lecturer at Princeton University's School of Architecture and Planning starting in 1972-1973. She was the first woman architect to teach at the University. She taught both design studio and theory including the influential course "The Theoretical Practice of Architecture" . In 1972 she became a fellow of The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, where she remained a fellow until 1984. At the IAUS she did research on the concept of place" from a semitic perspective,funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and taught at the Undergraduate Program in Architectural Education, where she was in charge of the pedagogical orientation of the design studios. She later became the Director of the Advanced Workshop in Architecture and Urban Form. Based on this work, in 1977 she was offered a teaching position by John Hejduk, dean of the school of architecture at the Cooper Union. Between 1987 and 1994 she divided her teaching between Cooper Union and Columbia University. She has also taught as a guest professor at Yale University, Princeton University and Paris 8 University.

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