Carl M. Sapers Ethics in Practice Lecture: Sylvia Lavin “Architecture After Fire”
Harvard GSD - Piper Auditorium, Cambridge, MA
This lecture, “Architecture After Fire,” argues that the rise of American architectural modernism was inseparable from the forest, not because of the use of timber, but because of modernism’s reliance on arboreal media—employing trees as information and communication systems and as metaphors. Tracking the white pine through deforestation, wildfire, and the formation of the Chicago school, this paper explores the series of substitutions, each triggered by fire, that converted environmental catastrophe into aesthetic doctrine and designated these operations as the primary function of modern architecture, artistically considered.