Flash in the Pan is the newest addition to the Architecture Words series, published by AA Publications. In this collection of meditations on what Baudelaire championed (and Michael Fried chastised) as presentness, Lavin investigates the convergence of notions such as liveness, the provisional and the obsolete in revealing qualities of the contemporary. Three sets of essays explore different forms of architectural time, particularly as they shape the differences between history, theory and criticism as genres of writing.
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Sylvia Lavin is a critic, historian and curator whose work explores the limits of architecture across a wide spectrum of historical periods. She is the Director of the Critical Studies and MA/PhD programmes in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. Her most recent books include Kissing Architecture (Princeton University Press, 2011) and Flash in the Pan (AA Publications, 2014). She the curator of Everything Loose Will Land, a large-scale exhibition focusing on the intersections between art and architecture in Los Angeles during the 1970s. Her next exhibition, Creative Spaces, explores the relationship between architecture and the radical redefinitions of creativity that have taken place since the advent of computing.