PROFILE
Sylvia Lavin, who was chair of the Department from 1996-2006, is a leading figure in contemporary architectural history, theory, and criticism. Lavin is the recipient of a 2011 Arts and Letters Award, as well as previous awards from the Getty Center, the Kress Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. In addition to her most recent book, Kissing Architecture, (Princeton University Press 2011) Lavin is the author of Quatremere de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (MIT, 1992), Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (MIT, 2005), and the forthcoming The Flash in the Pan and Other Forms of Architectural Contemporaneity. She initiated a series of architectural projects for the Hammer Museum, has been a guest curator for the CCA and Ace Galleries, and is currently working on a large-scale exhibition, Fin-de-Sixties LA: From Pop to Postmodernism. Lavin is the Director of Critical Studies in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, has been a Visiting Professor at Princeton University, the Havard Graduate School of Design and other international schools of architecture, and is the Director of Hi-C, a design/research group that supports architecture in the public realm.
EDUCATION
Ph.D., Columbia
M.A., Columbia
B.A., Barnard
AWARDS
2011 Arts and Letters Award
2004-05 Getty Center
Kress Foundation
Social Science Research Council
