Sylvia

Lavin

Sylvia Lavin currently serves as interim dean of the School of Architecture, leading Princeton’s center for undergraduate and graduate teaching and research in architectural design, history and theory, technologies, and urbanism.

An expert in the history and theory of architecture, Lavin has been a Princeton professor of architecture since 2018. She is widely recognized for studies that range across periods and geographies, from 18th century architectural theory in France to mid-century modernism. She is currently completing a book titled “Building Amid the Trees” about the arboreal infrastructure of American architecture during the 19th century, forthcoming as a Writing Architecture series published by MIT Press.

Lavin is also an accomplished curator. Her most recent project, “The Perimeter of Architecture: Amid the Elements" for the 2025 Venice Biennale, included works by School of Architecture faculty and students. Lavin’s other curatorial projects include “Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles,” which was part of the Pacific Standard Time series supported by the Getty Foundation, and “Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths,” held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Before coming to Princeton, Lavin was a professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, where she served as chair from 1996 to 2006. 

Lavin is the recipient of an Arts and Letters Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of multiple grants from the Getty Scholars Program. She is a member of the Museum of Modern Art’s architecture and design acquisition committee and the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s board of trustees. 

She received her master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and she holds a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College, Columbia University.