Sylvia Lavin, “Generator’s Vital Infrastructure”

e-flux Architecure presents “Generator’s Vital Infrastructure,” a lecture by Sylvia Lavin at e-flux on Tuesday, April 18 at 7pm.

Well known in the increasingly robust architectural literatures on the history of cybernetics and digital technology, Cedric Price’s Generator is also an important marker in an as of yet incomplete environmental history of the field. The project’s investigations into automated systems of growth and change and the particular forms of creativity proper to the knowledge worker in the information era led to its designation as the first intelligent building, but they also belong to a specifically American political ecology and economy in which occluded resources from southern states reappeared as cultural works of abstract value in northern metropolitan centers. Part of a larger work-in-progress on the conscription of trees in the field’s ongoing quest for autonomy, this presentation explores how a history that accounts for architecture’s reliance on the vital infrastructure of arboreal media can operate to reimagine the field’s relation to things in the world.

The lecture is the inaugural event of e-flux Architecture Lectures, a new monthly series inviting researchers and practitioners to discuss timely issues in contemporary architecture, theory, culture, and technology.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility                  
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.       
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.                
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.