Archinect - News

Michael Graves drawings acquired by Princeton University Art Museum

2019-05-31T13:59:00-04:00

“We are pleased to be able to preserve and share these important drawings, which document numerous projects and reflect Michael Graves’s manifold interests and talents, here at the museum, where he was known as family, and with our global audiences,”

The Princeton University Art Museum has acquired a collection of nearly 5,000 drawings created by postmodern-era architect Michael Graves.

Graves, who died in 2015, was a prolific artist who sketched out many of his iconic building proposals using his signature yellow-, sienna-, and aqua-hued color pencils. The gifted collection is filled with many examples of Graves's virtuosic output and includes drawings made with ink washes, pen and marker, and pencil, as well.

Drawing of San Pietro church in Frascati, Italy from 1961 by Michael Graves. Image from the Estate of Michael Graves via the Princeton University Art Museum.

Graves started his practice in 1964 at Princeton University, where he taught for 39 years before retiring in 2001. Throughout that long and storied career, Graves drew up designs for an incredible array of boundary-pushing buildings, including the Portland Building in Oregon, the Dolphin and Swan hotels at the Walt Disney World resort in Florida, as well as an unbu...

The Ascendancy of Theory: writer and theorist Sylvia Lavin on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #13

2016-02-29T16:03:00-05:00

Writer, critical theorist and architecture academic Sylvia Lavin has been a fixture in the southern California art and architecture scene for the better part of the last 30 years. Currently serving as Director of the Critical Studies programs at UCLA's Architecture and Urban Design department, she also recently launched a summer curatorial program at SCI-Arc, called MEAT: Making Exhibitions in Architecture Today, and is widely published on issues of architecture and art practice.

Lavin spoke with me about growing up in an academic family, splitting her childhood between New York and Rome, and her perception of the art/architectural scene in southern California. Special thanks to UCLA for helping coordinate our interview.

Listen to One-to-One #13 with Sylvia Lavin:

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SCI-Arc launches "MEAT," a curatorial summer program

2016-02-05T20:52:00-05:00

In the short time since Hernan Diaz Alonso assumed directorship of SCI-Arc, the prestigious architecture institute has already seen quite a few changes. Adding to the roster of programs at the newly-founded EDGE, a graduate center focusing on something like the "edges" of the rapidly-expanding discipline, SCI-Arc has just announced "MEAT", or "Making Exhibitions in Architecture Today", a graduate-level summer program for aspiring architecture curators.

Helmed by the respected theorist (and UCLA faculty member) Sylvia Lavin, MEAT intends to introduce summer students to the "intellectual and curatorial potentials in architectural exhibition practices".

The program will comprise a three and a half week course following an "intensive schedule of seminars and excursions," notably to local museums, galleries, and studios. Guest lecturers will include Sarah Herda of the Graham Foundation, Paola Antonelli from MoMA, and Giovanna Borasi from the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

“Launching ...

Art + Architecture: Jimenez Lai's 'Beachside Lonelyhearts' at Jai & Jai Gallery

2015-07-08T19:35:00-04:00

“Is there a line between architecture and art?” Sylvia Lavin, the influential architecture critic and scholar, asked Jimenez Lai, the architect-cum-artist, during a “Pillowtalk” reopening of his ongoing exhibit at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles. It’s a question that hovers over the rest of their open conversation, documented in videos posted below, as well as the show itself.

Beachside Lonelyhearts is the name of Lai’s immersive art installation, but it also encompasses what could be considered a durational performance or an architectural intervention. In fact, it’s a show that seems to inevitably precipitate such reflections about the status and relevance of genre distinctions – in no small part because of the distinction-defying oeuvres of both the artist and the gallery.

On the other hand, it’s an installation that has the capacity to grip you in its dizzying embrace, initiating a momentary lapse into a near-fugue state as you’re overcome by its byzantine array of black lines an...

Book Launch: "L.A. [TEN]: Interviews on Los Angeles Architecture 1970s-1990s" author in conversation with Aaron Betsky, Sylvia Lavin

2014-02-06T12:34:00-05:00

Last Tuesday's book launch for L.A. [TEN]: Interviews on Los Angeles Architecture 1970s-1990s at the A+D Museum brought author Stephen Phillips in conversation with the book’s publisher, Lars Müller, and architecture critics (among other things) Aaron Betsky and Sylvia Lavin. The book is a collaborative effort, culling work from students in Cal Poly’s L.A. Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design, Wim de Wit and Christopher Alexander of the Getty Research Institute, and Phillips himself. As an initiative that pits students alongside practicing professionals, combining oral history with journalistic investigation, L.A. [TEN] is both the artifact of an educational performance and a signpost in the continuing attempt to historicize L.A.’s messy architectural identity.

Lavin and Betsky kicked off the launch with miniature lectures, riffing on L.A.’s environmental and cultural context during the book’s era. Lacking the institutional validation of a strong publishing culture, archite...

Sylvia Lavin & Eric Owen Moss Butt Heads at SCI-Arc Discussion

2013-08-07T18:58:00-04:00

Well, it is the prerogative of men to enter the world without acknowledging that they are men. - Sylvia Lavin

Watching Sylvia Lavin and Eric Owen Moss in conversation at SCI-Arc last night, prolific Archinect blogger Lian Chang took careful note of a few key impasses -- where Lavin and Moss either failed to see eye-to-eye, or artfully dodged one another's argumentative traps. Lavin, an imposing academic presence as the Director of the Critical Studies MA/PhD for UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, set out to engage Moss, world-renowned architect and current SCI-Arc director, on architectural agency and pedagogy. When the architect’s reach is so far and deep, what is their responsibility to their environment, both physically and temporally? On a more psychological (and abstract) level, how does the architect’s memory of their past serve their present understanding?

To pose these questions, Lavin presented the audience with a few (now nearly nauseatingly ubiquitous, at least in Los Angeles) photos: of Moss on the beach, and in a collection of contemporaries’ portraits. ...

L.A. artists, architects' effect on each other at MAK Center exhibit

2013-05-24T18:49:00-04:00

The exhibition at the MAK Center in West Hollywood, curated by UCLA architectural historian and critic Sylvia Lavin, is a wry study of the ways Los Angeles artists and architects worked with, leaned on, stole from and influenced one another in the 1970s. In a larger sense, it charts the way Southern California architects threw off the influence of establishmen Modernism and helped remake the profession in that decade.

Packed with mostly small-scale work by artists Judy Chicago, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Smithson, Ed Moses and architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Charles Moore, Cesar Pelli and Frank Gehry, among many others, it is easily the most surprising and opinionated of the exhibitions to open as part of the Getty L.A. architecture series "Pacific Standard Time Presents."