SCI-Arc Launches Curatorial Summer Program led by Renowned Theorist, Critic and Historian Sylvia Lavin

SCI-Arc announced the launch of Making Exhibitions in Architecture Today (MEAT), a summer program introducing students to intellectual and curatorial potentials in architectural exhibition practices. Sylvia Lavin, renowned theorist, critic and historian will lead the new program. Currently the Director of Critical Studies in Architecture at UCLA, Lavin has taught at Princeton, Harvard, Columbia and numerous other institutions. She is a frequent contributor to journals such as Artforum and Log and serves as a member of the board for the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

“MEAT is the latest in a series of relationships the school is forging with the museum world,” Diaz Alonso said. “Partnering with Sylvia, a professor at UCLA, can only increase the potential to pair educational institutions and their students with the ever-expanding Los Angeles architecture, design and art community.” Outstanding students completing the program will have the opportunity to engage with the Canadian Center for Architecture, the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) as well as SCI-Arc’s own Design of Theory Fellowship program.

“Launching MEAT doesn’t come out of the blue,” Lavin said. “Curating is emerging as an independent discipline. With the proliferation and increased visibility of the architectural exhibition it is vital to create a diaspora of critical architectural curators. Architectural exhibitions are one of the most important forms of contemporary architectural practices today. This program engages future exhibition makers to redesign architecture itself.”

The three and a half week course follows an intensive schedule of seminars and excursions. Field trips to Los Angeles museums, galleries, archives and studios will advance the students’ research into the curatorial practice. Part of the ongoing program series are guest led workshops by Museum Directors, curators and other prominent practitioners including Sarah Herda, Director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s senior curator of Architecture and Design, Giovanna Borasi, Chief Curator of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Pippo Ciorra, Senior Curator at the MAXXl Architecturra in Rome.

“If an architectural exhibition is an instrument, what can it play?” Lavin posed. This is the question students in the program will begin to explore.

--

Sylvia Lavin is an internationally known critic, historian and curator whose work explores the limits of architecture across a wide spectrum of historical periods. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University and published her 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, with the MIT Press. Recent books include Flash in the Pan (2104), Kissing Architecture (2011) and Everything Loose Will Land: Art and Architecture in Los Angeles in the 1970s (2013). Lavin has been recognized by many grants and awards, most recently from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Getty Research Institute and the Graham Foundation.

--

SCI-Arc Edge, Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture
Seminars in Contemporary Cultural Practices

Making Exhibitions in Architecture Today (MEAT) is the first in a series of postgraduate seminars. SCI-Arc Edge seminars in contemporary cultural practices present students with an opportunity for short, intense, and intimate encounters with some of the most radical practices in culture today.