Architectural historian, author, and curator Sylvia Lavin has been appointed dean of Princeton University’s School of Architecture, making her the new Sylvia Lavin Princeton dean after serving as interim dean since January. Her appointment takes effect on November 1. The post gives her permanent leadership of a school where she has taught since 2018, when she joined the faculty as a professor of architecture.
Lavin’s research ranges across architectural history and design, from 18th-century French architectural theory to mid-century modernism. Her work examines the relationships between architecture, culture and the built environment, and that breadth shapes the curatorial projects she has led. One of the most recent is The Perimeter of Architecture: Amid the Elements, an international collaboration presented at the 2025 Venice Biennale with contributions from Princeton faculty and doctoral students.
Her exhibition record extends beyond Venice. Lavin curated Super Models, which was presented at the 2018 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, part of the Getty Foundation-supported Pacific Standard Time series. Each project reflects her interest in how architecture connects to art and to wider cultural conditions, which also runs through her writing.
Read more:
That writing includes Kissing Architecture and Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture. She is currently completing Arboreal Media and the Making of American Architecture, a media-environmental history forthcoming in MIT Press’s Writing Architecture series. Before the new title takes its place on her list, she takes on the administrative duties of running the school, which she has already carried through the months of her interim term.
Sylvia Lavin. Image credit: Allison Nugent
Her path to Princeton ran through several of the country’s leading architecture programs. Lavin taught at UCLA, where she chaired the Department of Architecture and Urban Design from 1996 to 2006, and she has also taught at Harvard, Columbia and the University of Southern California. That decade as a department chair gave her administrative experience well before she stepped into the interim deanship at Princeton.
Lavin has set out her goals for the school in clear terms. “Working with our stellar faculty and for our outstanding students, my goals as dean are to renew the lively conversations among design, history and theory, and building technology that have long distinguished the School of Architecture, and to emphasize a broad global perspective with special attention to how architects can respond with vigor and invention to the urgencies of the contemporary world,” Lavin said. Her tenure as dean begins on November 1.
For more background, see our guide to architecture portfolio.
Jane Doe is an American architectural editor with a deep-rooted passion for design and the built environment. She holds a degree in Architecture from Columbia University, where she developed a strong foundation in both architectural theory and urban studies. With over a decade of editorial experience, Jane specializes in shaping content that bridges architecture, urbanism, and cultural discourse. Her work spans leading design publications, exhibition texts, and digital platforms, where she is known for her clear, engaging narratives and her ability to translate complex spatial ideas for a broad audience. Jane is particularly interested in issues of equity, sustainability, and the evolving role of cities in a changing world.