So, if you were to divide the world into the good and bad, back then, it wasn't actually East Coast West Coast, it was theory versus not theory. And LA, like many places, had its zones where there was a lot of theory and had its zones where there was very little theory. Architecture, generally speaking, was a place of little theory. Welcome to Archimetic Sessions 1-1.
I'm Amelia Taylor-Hockberg, and for this February 29th, 2016 episode, I speak with writer, critical theorist, and architecture academic, Sylvia Laven. Growing up in an academic family that had her splitting a childhood between New York and Rome, Laven trained as a flautist and vocalist before then turning to architecture, getting her PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia in 1990. Since she has been a fixture in the Southern California Art and Architecture scene, and currently serves as director of the Critical Studies programs at UCLA's Department of Architecture and Urban Design. I invited her on the podcast after the announcement of Meet, a new summer program she was spearheading at its I-ARC, stands for Making Exhibitions in Architecture Today.
I ask Laven about her perspective on Southern California Architecture discourse, and how academia informs practice, and join my one-to-one until we leave it. So I would like to just start, if we can, from what might be the very beginning. I'm interested, where did you grow up? Where I grew up is actually a difficult question to answer, because I grew up in a lot of different places, primarily going back and forth between New York and Rome.
But just to give you a sort of flavor of it, I never went to the same school twice in a row until I was in high school. So then I went to high school in Princeton, New Jersey, but by then I think most of my growing up was done. So what was the reason for that, I can't see? Interesting, both of my parents were academics, and that was a time in which there was lots of sort of money for academics, at least academics of a humanistic bent.
So my father taught someplace where you only taught two semesters out of four, and there was lots of grant money, and every now and again he'd have to go back to New York to teach. And so we went around where his research and my mother's research took them, which was mostly to Rome. And then the relationship to New York and that general area, was that just where they were from? And so it made sense to them to say a home place or had more to do with the academic nature.
Yeah, no, no, no. So my father was a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, the graduate art history school at NYU. So technically our home base was New York. It just happened to be that during those 14 years he had a lot of, you know, leave and fellowship time, and so spent a lot of it in Rome.
So when you were in Rome, did you have any, just as a child and going back there constantly, did you have an understanding of the place as a kind of architectural mecca, and how did you kind of come into understanding Rome's particular place in architectural history? I don't think I completely did until I was a graduate student. So when I was a graduate student, one in a very competitive and highly neurotic program, which I think is what all doctoral programs are like, one of my classmates went to the professor of my Baroque architectural history class and complained that I should not be allowed to take the exam because I was a ringer. Having grown up in Rome, the kid of a scholar of Baroque things, it was somehow assumed that this had all entered my poor as kind of by osmosis.
At the time, I thought it was ridiculous and paranoid and neurotic. And in retrospect, she was totally right, you know, which is to say that I knew things about Rome and that, you know, in its place in the history of architecture that nobody without my experience would have exactly had. Most of my long period of time in Rome was between, you know, I was quite young, but sort of up until the mid 1970s. And that was a strange period because there was no contemporary culture in Rome, if I can say something so, Gres.
You know, the days of the glory days of Rome were over and, you know, nobody was really interested in historical things and there was no culture to support contemporary things. So Rome was a kind of a strange backwater, you know, not in all the way it is now. So my experience of it was more a place of lacking, you know, that didn't have modern things and didn't have bazooka bubble gum. I mean, remember that one in particular.
But I suppose, you know, then you absorb unconsciously other aspects and other forms of knowledge about about a city. And it's really that sort of unconscious stratum of knowledge that I got that really was an unfair advantage. Well, so your parents were they art and architecture scholars? Was that their particular focus?
Yeah. And so was it over a source of family contention of whether or not you would kind of follow in those footsteps? Big time. So I guess if you from that point, after you have this back and forth, you move on to continue going through studies at Columbia.
And what was your particular source of study at Columbia? What was your research focus on? Well, so let me just take one step back. Sure.
I made like all kids, you know, I made a bid for freedom. So it's not as though I immediately and always knew I would go into the family schmata business, which is in effect what I did. But there was a period of time where I was a very serious musician and went to conservatory and went to Oberlin Conservatory and went to Manhattan School of Music. And I had a different life path that I had, you know, that I had staked out.
And for various reasons, I sort of backed into things and became a general English major. And so in other words, it wasn't quite as simple a process as I'm making it just making it sound. But it does sound like you were a little bit more committed than most in their perhaps adolescent or teenagerish rebellious qualities of saying that you got to the point of conservatory status at something like Oberlin just out of curiosity. What music did you play?
What was your, what was the air practice there? Believe it or not, I was a double major in voice and flute. And everybody asked me about it. And, you know, one day I decided that this was not for me.
I, you know, I initially thought that Ohio was not a good place for me. So after a, you know, not very long, it really, I transferred to Manhattan School of Music. And then once I was there, I realized, you know, actually it was the music conservatory world. That was not the right for me.
And I was living on 110th Street and had to walk through Barnard in Columbia to get from Manhattan School of Music to my apartment. And one day, sort of just without thinking about it, I took a right hand turn into Barnard. I'm old enough that women did not go to Columbia in those days. And I, so I took a right turn into Barnard and I said, you know, I think I should be at this school, not at that one.
And they more or less accepted me that day. And I dropped out of music school and essentially never played or sang a note again. It all sounds very dramatic. I suppose it was.
But that's how that happened. So we can't expect one of your next lectures or interviews in the architecture world to be introed by a flute solo. No, I'm not going to sing a Rettio Tati or anything like that. Although I have become, I was, I was what I loved more than anything was actually playing early modern music on recorders and every, I still have my instruments run every now and again.
I think, you know, I'm going to pick that up. It seems like a nice thing to do in your old age. But so far I haven't done it. So no, I won't, I won't sing or play.
Never too late. Well, I guess I'm very interested then. And now because of so much of your work is based in Southern California and you're very heavily involved in and for have been for many years at UCLA and also have a heavy role at SIRAC and in this kind of West Coast regionalism of architectural discourse, whereas your training is very much from the East Coast area and kind of indebted to that culture. I'm wondering what you kind of first of all, what brought you out West and kind of your understanding now after many years of being heavily influential and involved in this culture, how you kind of perceive the basic East West Coast economy.
Well, the start with the first one. Why don't you come out here? So, so I came out because I was fortunate enough to have received a Getty, I can't actually remember whether it was a finishing dissertation grant or convert your dissertation into a book grant. But I came out here for a nine month grant period or that's what I imagined.
And in fact, left my cat in New York with a friend. So I really imagined it as very temporary. And then while I was here, you know, but I was finishing my degree, I needed to, you know, I was sort of going on the academic job circuit and they offered me a job at USC. And it was actually interesting because I think that they felt that they had to make a better sort of levered deal with people from the East Coast than the East Coast schools had to make.
So they were very good schools on the East Coast, but they were offering very low pay for very heavy teaching loads. And here that's not the way it worked. And so I ended up at USC and within a very short amount of time was, you know, really within the first semester, sorry, USC, I was recruited to UCLA, really by Frank Israel, who I spent a lot of time in Rome. I mean, I guess the point is that I fell initially into a crowd here that was itself very New York oriented.
So there was a bit of a subculture of New Yorkers here. And that was part of what enabled me to, you know, to feel that I was not in an alien territory, I suppose. I also want to elaborate a little bit on that. So in the 90s, this was in like the late 80s, early 90s, early 90s.
So if the context here did have a strong New York accent of sorts, what differentiated it? And what did you come to realize? Did you come to kind of see this emerging West Coast architectural discourse? I don't want to call it a regionalist necessarily if it's not limited to Southern California, but just what you kind of saw emerging as the kind of core concerns of the discourse and how it was presenting itself with things like Sire kind of being after their, you know, initial Vanguard heyday days and kind of moving into, you know, having that perspective of both the private university USC and what UCLA is up to.
Just what were your perceptions of how it was distinguishing itself at that time? Well, in those days, gosh, I was pretty naive about the fact that there was supposed to be a big East Coast, West Coast economy and didn't really see it in those terms. The terms of the 90s was the ascendancy of what then was called theory. And the world then was divided between, was increasingly divided between those who saw value in engaging with what was called theory.
I'm not calling it that. I'm just saying that that's what it's called. And, and those who did not see the value in that. So if you were to divide the world into, you know, the good and bad back then, it wasn't actually East Coast, West Coast, it was theory versus not theory.
And LA was like many places had its zones where there was a lot of theory and had its zones where there was very little theory. Architecture generally speaking was a place of little theory. The theory on the other hand, planning was very advanced in that area. So, soja and, you know, that kind of thing, a lot of the, a lot of the sort of critical discourses actually began in LA, if you will.
But at any rate, I didn't see it as a geographical thing in that way. I saw it as a set of intellectual divisions. So that's why I saw it. And then I would also go on to say that I would tend still to understand these things in institutional terms, which is to say in LA, a place like SIRC, which is a very important school in many regards, is not part of university.
It's most sailing at characteristic is that it is not part of university. That gives it enormous freedoms of many kinds, bureaucratic, creative, intellectual, et cetera. It also limits its capacity to produce certain kinds of discourse. In those days, the discourse machine was heavily oriented towards a certain kind of academic culture, not intrinsically.
So it just, it just, in those days, that's what was happening. So LA did not have the institutional infrastructure in architecture to be a big theory producing territory. And so now it seems we've certainly progressed far away from that, at least in taking from things like the new meat programs that you're kind of spearheading at SIRC in regards to curatorial programs, specifically at SIRC. So presumably also catering towards not just people interested in curating architectural works, but also architects themselves who might be interested in straddling both the art practice and architectural practice kind of fields.
So specifically in regards to this meat program about architectural curation, doesn't that kind of speak to this new attention towards the kind of theory aspect of architecture kind of validating that is that there is this renewed interest in the theoretical architecture and also how we can actually curate it. Can you tell me a little bit about why you wanted to start a program about it to this? Well, the program is very carefully not organized around the idea of curating in particular, which is to say one of the things that is interesting about exhibition culture today is that exhibitions are a site not just for showing work, let's say produced elsewhere, which would be the traditional model of the curator, but for producing a complex kind of work that is somewhere between sort of architecture as a creative practice, architecture as an intellectual critical practice, and architecture as a research and knowledge producing practice. So exhibition making now I think is increasingly say better than a book for collecting, producing and communicating ideas about architecture.
One of the things that I think is interesting about LA or again, interesting and problematic about LA is its institutional structure. So if you look around the city, it has a lot of great museums and none of them have permanent staff or permanent programs and architecture. It's a problem. It's got to also be an opportunity in some way, which is to say that you don't have to work through the channels of power that make say in New York, MoMA be such a dominant force.
So we don't have the dominant force, but we also don't really have the institutional platforms that support robust, contentious, debateful events around architectural exhibition making. So the more we can activate that through programs at schools, through exhibitions themselves, through conversations about it and so forth, I think the more we can both produce new ideas about architecture and engage new kinds of publics in that conversation. So what about something like the Architecture and Design Museum? Does that hold a little bit of opportunity for those kinds of things?
Well, of course. And again, I would say that the more the merrier, the more exhibitions, the more discourse, the better, the more there is, the more demands we can make. I think for now, people in the field are more or less happy when anything happens, but that doesn't necessarily hold a very high bar. And I think that they do wonderful things.
I think that I would imagine that when you talk to the people who work there, they have to spend a lot of time raising money and having two sticks to rub together. It's not for them, I'm sure, a situation in which they feel fully supported to do the kinds of exhibitions that they want to do at the best level, but they could do them. So it's great. It's great.
But you can't take the A&D Museum and compare it to a big encyclopedic museum with a full department and all of that institutional apparatus and funding and so on and so forth. They're just not comparable. So one last question to also bring in this conversation of emerging forms of architectural exhibitions and new interests in that. You're most recent book, Kissing Architecture for Abolition 2011.
Exams is kind of, you know, many puns can be made, but the flirtatious engagement or relationship between emerging, often new media art forms in the art world and architects and art practicing architects working in the world of architecture. Is there a particular moment or architectural work or architect that you know of, that you first noticed operating in this kind of flirtatious territory that prompted you to write the book or just made you notice, take notice of this happening? Or perhaps maybe not the initial, the originator, but just who do you see operating today? That kind of straddles that line.
I'm not sure I would point to who's. I think that I was really just trying to say that the bandwidth through which we have tended to understand media and architecture has been through the bandwidth of mass media and advertising. And those terms tended to produce a view of architecture in which the relationship between architecture and building remained very clear, which is to say what architecture is buildings and then buildings can circulate and be deflated and be reduced to and be critiqued as their representations in mass media. I guess I was trying to arrive at a formulation that I don't think that architecture as such can be reduced to the notion of building and buildings can't be reduced to the notion of advertising either and that the relationships between media have now become so rich and manifold that it's very difficult and maybe entirely unproductive to start trying to delaminate things like media architecture from one another.
So the actual instigation for that essay, I wouldn't really misdest an extended critical essay. It's not a book and it doesn't have the gravitas of a book. I'm just saying it was actually instigated by a very specific event, which was walking into the Museum of Modern Art to see a PP-RIST installation and thinking about walking into a Museum of Modern Art Gallery that I had always found totally banal and uninteresting and always found it to be a place where I felt very sad for architecture. If that was the best the Museum of Modern Art could do, it was pretty damn depressing as far as I was concerned.
And so PP-RIST installation was just an opportunity to think how architecture can be transformed, it can be very largely transformed with a little bit more nerve. And so I think that the Institute, I mean, if PP-RIST is not very controversial, to say the least, you know, there are a lot of people who think of her as producing pretty art, that's not controversial enough. But nevertheless, she was permitted to operate on a level of with a degree of inventive latitude that architects generally don't have. So that was really where it started.
Well, it's definitely something that we kind of see reduced unfairly perhaps, but reduced to the idea of this art architecture and dichotomy, or potentially self-reinforcing kind of hybrid style of operating where if it doesn't work in architecture, you can do it in art or if it doesn't work in art, you can try to do architecture. But it's definitely something that we constantly have an attention to on architects and are very interested in exploring as how architects are approaching these new ideas and moving forward and continually defining what the discipline is capable of. So Sylvia, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today and talking with me. You're welcome.
Bye to have you. Thanks for listening to our Connect sessions one-to-one with Sylvia Lavin. Donnie Loinoff edits the podcast and Matt Skilling's composed our music. Myself and Poppitruña are the producers of one-to-one.
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