Sylvia Lavin “Architecture After Fire”
LIVESTREAM INFO
| A live stream for this event will be available on this page at the scheduled start time. Closed captioning is available by clicking the “CC” icon at the bottom of the player window. |
About this Event
This lecture, “Architecture After Fire,” argues that the rise of American architectural modernism was inseparable from the forest, not because of the use of timber, but because of modernism’s reliance on arboreal media—employing trees as information and communication systems and as metaphors. Tracking the white pine through deforestation, wildfire, and the formation of the Chicago school, this talk explores the series of fires that resulted in environmental catastrophes and ultimately inspired new aesthetic doctrines. This process would become the primary function of aesthetics in modern architecture.
Speaker
Sylvia Lavin is a professor of the history and theory of architecture and Interim Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University. Lavin’s scholarship explores the limits of architecture across a wide spectrum of historical periods. She is currently completing Arboreal Media and the Making of American Architecture, forthcoming in the Writing Architecture series published by Anyone Corporation with MIT Press, and Amid the Elements, with Inventory Press, a book based on her environmental history of architecture animated by forgotten encounters between building and the elements exhibited at the 2025 Venice Biennale. She received her PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University after having received fellowships from the Getty Center, the Kress Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. The MIT Press published her first books, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (1992) and Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (2005). Lavin’s other curatorial projects include Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, a Pacific Standard Time project, and Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths.
Harvard University welcomes individuals with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you would like to request accommodations or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact the Public Programs Office at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected] in advance of your participation or visit. Requests for American Sign Language interpreters and/or CART providers should be made at least two weeks in advance. Please note that the University will make every effort to secure services, but that services are subject to availability.
#GSDEVENTS