Sylvia Lavin, “Architecture After Fire”

Sylvia Lavin is a professor of the history and theory of architecture who explores the limits of the field across historical periods.
About this Event

• Livestream Link: This event will be in person and livestreamed. The livestream is available at the top of this page: https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/architecture-after-fire/
• Please note: RSVP does not guarantee entry, which is filled on a first-come-first-served basis. Doors open 15 minutes before the event begins, so be sure to arrive early.

About This Event

Architecture After Fire argues that the rise of American architectural modernism was inseparable from the forest, not by virtue of the use of timber as material but through its reliance on arboreal media. Tracking the white pine through deforestation, wildfire, and the formation of the Chicago school, this paper explores the series of substitutions, each triggered by fire, that converted environmental catastrophe into aesthetic doctrine and designated these operations as the primary function of modern architecture, artistically considered.

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 Ph.D. 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 and Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture in 1992 and 2005. 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, CCA, 2018, which offered a critical account of an apparently all-too-familiar era.