Sylvia Lavin
Professor, History and Theory of Architecture
B.A., Barnard College, Columbia University
M.A., Columbia University
M.Phil., Columbia University
Ph.D., Columbia University
Lavin received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University in 1990 after having received fellowships from the Getty Center, the Kress Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Prior to her appointment at Princeton, Lavin was a Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, where she was Chairperson from 1996 to 2006 and the Director of the Critical Studies M.A. and Ph.D. program from 2007 to 2017.
The MIT Press published Lavin’s 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. Her most recent books include, Kissing Architecture, published by Princeton University Press in 2011 and Flash in the Pan, an AA publication from 2015.
Professor Lavin is also a curator: a recent exhibition, Everything Loose Will Land: Art and Architecture in Los Angeles in the 1970s, was a principal component of the Pacific Standard Time series supported by the Getty Foundation and traveled from Los Angeles to New Haven and to Chicago. Exhibition Models, a show she curated for the Princeton University School of Architecture, opened in September 2018. The exhibition presented 18 models collected by Heinrich Klotz, historian of Brunelleschi and chronicler of postmodernism, as he formed the German Architecture Museum (DAM). Her installation, Super Models, was shown at the 2018 Chicago Architecture Biennial and she is currently working on Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernists Myths, an exhibition that will open at the Canadian Center for Architecture in the Fall of 2018.
Lavin is the recipient of an Arts and Letters Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
