Sylvia Lavin, “Architecture After Fire”

In Architecture After Fire, the Carl M. Sapers Ethics in Practice Lecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Sylvia Lavin examines the connection between American architectural modernism and the forest, not through the use of timber as a building material, but through modernism’s dependence on trees as media: as systems of information and communication, and as metaphor.

The lecture takes place on Monday 23 November 2026 from 6.30 to 8 pm (EST) in Piper Auditorium at the GSD in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is hosted by Sarah M. Whiting, is free and open to the public, and is also streamed online.

Focus of the lecture

The talk follows the history of the white pine through episodes of deforestation, wildfire and the emergence of the Chicago school. Through this trajectory, it traces a sequence of substitutions, each set in motion by fire, that transformed environmental catastrophe into aesthetic doctrine. Lavin frames these substitutions as central to what she identifies as the primary function of modern architecture when considered as an artistic practice. The event image, The Lumber District of Chicago, an engraving published in Harper’s Weekly in 1883, shows the stacked timber of the city’s lumber yards.

About Sylvia Lavin

Sylvia Lavin is a professor of the history and theory of architecture and Interim Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University. Her scholarship explores the limits of architecture across a wide range of historical periods. She is 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 exhibited at the 2025 Venice Biennale.

Her earlier books with MIT Press are 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). Her 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. She received her PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University, after fellowships from the Getty Center, the Kress Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.