Baumer Lecture Series, Sylvia Lavin

Unknowing Origins: Plantations, Paper and the Price of the Postmodern

In 1976, Cedric Price, a leading figure in London’s mod architectural scene, began work on what he called Generator, a reconfigurable and autonomously acting set of architectural elements designed to house a center for performance art. Best known for being among the first efforts to embed computational intelligence into building, the never-realized structure was conceived as a biocybernetic organism, generated through responsive feedback between itself and its environment. It was also, however, an architectural commission situated on a vast tract of land on the border of Florida and Georgia scarred by its settler-colonial past and history as a plantation, and entangled in violent conflicts between corporate interests and environmental activists in its postmodern present. Generator thus provides the opportunity to examine how architectural technics operated to manage fundamentally incompatible definitions of environment and to establish unknowing origins as the sine qua non of architecture itself.

Sylvia Lavin

Sylvia Lavin is a critic, curator, historian, and theorist whose work explores the limits of architecture across a wide spectrum of historical periods. She received her PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University and 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. Ms. Lavin has curated several research-based exhibitions including Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths, which opened at the CCA in 2018 and Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, which was shown at the MAK/Schindler House, the Graham Foundation, and at the Yale School of Architecture.

She is Professor of Architecture at Princeton University and was Chairperson and Director of the Critical Studies MA and PhD program in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. Lavin is currently working on a book about trees.