Lab for discontent?

Rushing into a crowded, high-ceilinged room in UCLA’s Perloff Hall, Sylvia Lavin, a freckled 42-year-old with a pageboy haircut, baggy black pants and a long cardigan trailing behind her, could be just another student a few minutes late to class.

She sits and sheepishly apologizes for being tardy as the review, led by a tousle-haired architecture professor named Jason Payne, begins. Reviews, which take place at the close of several months of dedicated studio work, are where students get constructive, though sometimes unsparing, feedback about their designs. The 30 or so students, whose plans are pinned to the walls, have a rumpled, professional handsomeness that makes the scene look like an art school imagined by Banana Republic.

As Payne introduces the class assignment -- designing homes for a tight, difficult plot in the Hollywood Hills -- Lavin kids that his eloquent introduction has already raised the price of the land. In between asking about seismic codes and comparing one design with the Case Study House project, she says one student’s plans made her “rethink the way I think of the Hollywood Hills,” what she calls “this weird agglomeration” neither suburban nor urban.

Lavin’s words, whether casual or serious, command immediate attention. Though her relaxed manner doesn’t betray it, she outranks virtually everyone in the room: As chairwoman of UCLA’s department of architecture and urban planning, she oversees 168 graduate students and more than two dozen faculty.

Architecture, in the end, is about building, and friends and foes alike credit her with building UCLA’s department into one of the nation’s most prestigious. The hard-driving New York native has taken the graduate program, nicknamed AUD, into the international eye with a stunning rigor and speed.

Since taking over as chairwoman in 1996, she’s recruited and retained a flashy faculty that includes Thom Mayne, Craig Hodgetts and Mark Mack, as well as many young guns. Lavin’s husband, celebrated young architect Greg Lynn, is another feather in her department’s cap.

She brought the program -- which even its former leader recalls as solid but provincial -- into step with the latest critical theory, and with the sophisticated and flexible computer design pioneered by Lynn.

This spring, a group of students and faculty heads to the Netherlands for the first International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, where they will discuss Los Angeles’ freeway system as the city’s truest public space. UCLA will be the only American school among 10 universities presenting work to professionals and scholars.

But as she’s built prestige, some charge, Lavin has torn down the department’s civility, its intellectual balance. Her critics describe a place where students are publicly humiliated in reviews, where professors wax rhapsodic about the high dropout rate, where a didactic and dismissive tone reigns, where professors offer ultimatums instead of an education. And where, they say, the woman in charge is an “intellectual bully.”

“At AUD, instructors are supervised by their spouses, siblings and old friends,” says Gerardo Gambirazzio, a student who hopes to spend his final year at Berkeley. “This is indeed the worst case of nepotism and cronyism since Caligula appointed his horse as consul.”

While a minority of the faculty harbor deep frustration with Lavin -- the rare woman to make a mark in architecture’s old boys’ club, a field still nearly 90% male -- most of the complaints have come from students.

Some gathered last spring to discuss their problems with the program and decided, as the meeting spilled over to a bar nearby, that they needed to organize to depose Lavin. A core group formed in the next few weeks, with the students calling themselves “the 22.”

They’ve since approached the then-dean overseeing the department with their complaints and put up an extensive Web site, which has logged about 20,000 visits, documenting their problems with Lavin and the program -- everything from allegedly providing unsafe lab equipment (which has since been addressed) to forcing out students who disagree intellectually and turning a public university into a private club. After letters were sent to UCLA administrators, the students met with an associate dean and ombudsman. University administrators also met with Lavin, who offered letters of response, and later held a town-hall style meeting to discuss student frustration.

“I think we have now articulated the desire to be an important school that trains competent architects,” says Lavin, “and that helps set the terms of the debate.”

Chris Waterman, acting dean for the School of Arts and Architecture, defends Lavin’s actions. “The program had to take a hard look at itself and decide which direction it wanted to take,” he says. “Issues come up when a department changes direction; there’s always a period of adjustment. But if departments don’t change, they end up mired in the past.”

‘MOMENT OF INTENSITY’

No department’s successes -- or failures -- are the exclusive work of one individual. To Lavin, though, “the moment of intensity” around an architecture program is usually associated with the person who leads it. “So one talks about Harvard under [Walter] Gropius,” she says of the Bauhaus founder who spread Modernist ideals through the U.S. in the 1940s. “One talks about Penn under Louis Kahn. One talks about Yale under Bob Stern.”

It’s clear that her moment of intensity could reshape the school for the very long term.

Even Lavin’s foes credit her intelligence and drive, but they wonder about her values. “Why does the glory of the school have to come at the expense of our education?” asks Ashley Kessler, one of more than a dozen students who have recently dropped out.

Kessler, who calls the program intellectually rigid and says she left after seeing students bullied in reviews, recalls Lavin repeatedly insisting that the changes were all for the good of the school.

The students challenging Lavin -- those who’ve left and those who’ve stayed -- know they’ve got their fight cut out for them. So do her lieutenants.

“She has a huge strength-to-weight ratio,” says Mayne, of the Morphosis firm, who teaches in Lavin’s program. “Little -- under 100 pounds, I think. Tough, strong, a fighter. Can get something done. She has what it takes to be in a leadership role.”

Lavin describes herself as an “accidental administrator,” someone who envisioned herself teaching, writing and thinking about a discipline that shapes the way we see the world.

Her recent scholarship concerns emigre architect Richard Neutra and the way his houses reflect the psychology, sexual mores and sense of home of the mid-century. She’s especially intrigued by his roots in the Vienna of Sigmund Freud: Lavin calls architecture “the box into which desire and fantasy are placed.”

Its accidental birth aside, Lavin’s leadership of the department has drawn praise from the field’s elite. “Sylvia Lavin has put UCLA on the map,” says Bernard Tschumi, dean of Columbia University’s School of Architecture. Others say UCLA’s has become, under Lavin, the most dynamic school on the West Coast. “I see a world-class thinker who’s put together a great group of people and produced some strong graduates,” says Liz Diller of New York’s innovative Diller & Scofidio. “I’m in awe of what she’s done,” says Frank Gehry, whose 150-person Santa Monica office has more alums from UCLA than from any other school, despite his longtime professorship at Yale.

A scholarly pedigree

Lavin’s interest in architecture was an accident too: In college at Barnard, where she was an English major, she fell in love with an architecture student and soon with the field itself.

Academia was a natural for Lavin, the daughter of two imposing scholars -- Irving Lavin, an authority on Baroque art who teaches at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, a Princeton University professor who brought computers to the study of the Italian Renaissance.

She grew up in New York, Princeton and Rome. But despite her pedigree, Lavin’s first serious dive into academia, as a graduate student at Columbia University in the early ‘80s, left her frustrated. She found the program, then part of the art and archeology department, stodgy and conventional.

“In those days,” she says, “theory was a euphemism for progressive thought.” And Columbia, she says, was “hostile to the progressive ... they taught you to be very afraid of it.”

Lavin spent the final year of her doctorate, 1989 to ‘90, in California as a Getty Fellow. “The year I was there the theme was ‘the Avant-Garde,’ ” she recalls. “And it turned out to bring together a whole constellation of really fascinating people.”

After completing her doctorate and teaching for a year at USC, she was hired at UCLA by then-dean Richard Weinstein, another New York emigre, who had worked for Mayor John Lindsay and helped redevelop 42nd Street. “I admired the clarity of her mind, her energy,” says Weinstein, who is now an AUD professor and projects a tweedy, grandfatherly manner.

The department, he says, needed someone like Lavin: He was still reeling from being approached by a class of angry students who could not make out their course readings because the pages had been photocopied 30 times, over as many years, by a lazy professor who is no longer on the UCLA faculty.

“In those days, Sylvia was, of course, much younger, and she had an element of self-deprecation, which made me feel she was approachable and vulnerable -- sensitive -- despite the power of her mind,” Weinstein says. “These elements may not be as dominant in her persona now as they were then.”

Lavin’s first few years at UCLA were not happy ones. She felt overlooked. But after UC budget cuts split what was the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning into two separate departments, the university looked for a new faculty chair to replace Weinstein, who stepped down in 1994.

Many saw her as an unlikely choice.”I’m not a man, I’m not an architect, I’m not 60,” says Lavin, who often describes herself as an outsider in a field dominated by older WASP men. “And I’m Jewish.” She was also, at the time, an untenured member of the faculty, and a restless and frustrated member to boot.

“But I really think that the stakes were not big. The chair had never been used to affect the program, and so it didn’t really matter as long as the bureaucracy was kept moving.”

A national search for a chair was launched but didn’t yield viable candidates, Lavin says, and many of the senior architects already at UCLA were too busy to take on the position.

The program Lavin inherited was strong in sustainable design, “green architecture,” and the use of computers as analytic tools. She moved the department from these fields and toward critical theory and digital design.

Among her boldest moves was to encourage much of the department’s senior faculty, many of them tenured, to retire. “It’s hard, it’s hard to be current,” she says. “But one of the things a university can do for its students and faculty is to provoke them into currency.”

A key hire was Lynn, then a professor at Columbia who was already developing an international reputation as a computer designer. A mellow Midwesterner, he came to California in 1996; in February 1999 he married Lavin. (Lynn, 38, and Lavin, who live in Santa Monica, have two children, Sophie, 4, and Jasper, 22 months.) Many of Lavin’s earliest hires were computer whizzes -- young Turks such as David Erdman and Mark Lee who she says will make up the field’s future -- that she or Lynn knew from Columbia. Lynn says Lavin was, if anything, too successful: Her hires are now “being heavily recruited as chairs of other architecture departments. The biggest problem with a school like UCLA, which blossoms quickly, is that every other school in the country is looking for talent. They’ll strip it.”

Determined to match the celebrity of schools such as Yale and Harvard, Lavin brought in Tschumi from Columbia University, Zaha Hadid from London, Rem Koolhaas from the Netherlands and Diller from Princeton -- not as visiting faculty, which would have cost too much, but for shorter workshops that included one-on-one work with students. She described it as a way of bringing some intensity to AUD on a beer budget.

“I don’t think I had a model,” Lavin says. “It meant upping the intensity instead of copying a model we couldn’t possibly hope to imitate.”

A movement grows

Last June, about 20 students -- worried for other students or feeling threatened themselves -- met with the university’s ombudsman at UCLA’s Strathmore building.

Some of the discussion was about abstract problems, what they called a general intolerance, ideological rigidity or alleged lack of respect for students. But some of it was more tangible -- they claim students were called into professors’ offices and threatened, ordered to stop asking difficult questions. The most serious complaints involved students who had earned a B-minus in their first studio class, where grades are very subjective: Under a long-standing -- and now highly enforced -- departmental policy, they had landed on academic probation and were in danger of failing.

“People come from all over the country to go to UCLA,” says a student who is still enrolled. “UCLA actively recruits all over. And it’s not pleasant to come 3,000 miles and be told you’ll be kicked out after first quarter.”

The group of students ended up at a Westwood bar, where they decided that Lavin and her my-way-or-the-highway management style had to go. They say that as they spoke to UCLA officials in the ensuing months, the lack of response -- despite an initial show of concern -- convinced them to make their complaints public via the Web.

According to the Web site, 36 students in the classes of ‘02, ’03 and ‘04, which have a total of 126 students, have left or been forced out. Department files record the loss of 28 students from classes totaling 128. Architecture programs typically lose a few students per term, but not always; USC’s School of Architecture has lost none of its 25 master’s students for ’02 or ’03.

The Web site, which students maintain anonymously because of fear of reprisal, has further strained relations. “It’s like an abusive family situation where you’re not supposed to go outside the family,” says one of “the 22.” “They were angry at us for going outside the department.”

AUD’s supporters say that all academic departments have unhappy students, and that the rigor of architecture programs, with their long hours and intense pressure, makes the experience volatile. It’s only the Internet, they say, that has given this typical student squabble a bullhorn.

“I think architecture schools tend to have their moments where they can map out the discipline and chart new territory, and that’s what’s happening at UCLA,” says Alexandra Loew, a graduate student who lauds the direction Lavin is taking. “She’s really adamant that you do work that’s meaningful.”

The rebelling students hardly seem like the callow 23-year-olds several faculty members described. Within their ranks are a former art professor who ran a successful design studio, a political lobbyist with years of experience in state government and a lawyer with a degree from New York University. Some of the problems stem directly from Lavin, they charge. Several remember Lavin beginning her theory class one term with, “Don’t argue with me -- I’ll win.” Lavin says she does not recall saying this.

Topping the list of complaints were the introductory design studios -- often the toughest part of an architectural degree -- that form the core of the program. These are typically taught by junior faculty, many of them Lavin’s hires and many of them historians or theorists with limited experience in design.

One student went to Dana Cuff, vice-chairwoman of the department and Lavin’s right-hand woman, about problems he was having with instructors.

“And then she let loose on me,” he says. “I was stunned. She said, ‘The first thing you have to realize is that you don’t understand studio culture.’ But I’d been working in design studios for a dozen years! Then she made these subtle but nasty comments. ‘I’m not your psychologist, but if I were, I’d say you need to surrender to the program.’ She called it ‘ritual scarring.’ That’s when I realized this is getting a little cultish.”

Cuff has a different recollection of the exchange: “I cannot imagine saying anything like that. I wouldn’t patronize a student.”

Still, she says she empathizes with students breaking into the rituals of architecture school.

“It’s a shock to the system,” says Cuff, who has written about the insularity of architecture culture in “Architecture: The Story of Practice.” “It’s a very difficult transition for anyone. But sometimes students make the wrong decision, and they blame us.”

But it’s also AUD’s overall tone, which students say Lavin has created, that has caused the trouble.

“In a traditional architectural education, you are educating architects who will be building buildings you may find yourself inside of someday,” says an L.A. architect who had ties to the program. “And so you actually care that the students become conscientious and good at this. But there’s no sense of that there.”

For other students, Lavin’s inaccessibility is a problem. Lavin, they say, brought in ill-equipped and insulting faculty members, then went missing when the problems they created needed to be solved.

“You go through three or four people to get to her. I thought I was back in the Army again,” says Gambirazzio, who fought in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. “The first year I was here I took a class with Michael Dukakis. I could walk into his office any time and discuss housing issues. But [Lavin] is the chair of the department, and I can’t even find her.” Lavin says she’s accessible, and that she keeps at least one office hour a week.

A matter of image

Reputation, says Eric Owen Moss, the L.A. architect who recently became dean of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, is overrated, and the reputation of a West Coast school among the Ivy League intelligentsia is almost irrelevant. To Lavin, it’s crucial.

“Reputation is what enables you to have excellent students and what enables you to have a good faculty -- at a minimum,” she says, seemingly baffled by so simple a question. “And it has a significant impact on what happens to the students afterward.” She worries that the Web site and student frustration will damage her ability to build the program’s image.

Lavin admits she’s shaken by the revolt. As she talks about it, she alternates between defiance and philosophical detachment. To her, the battle is about the price of prestige.

“I think that change is very difficult,” she says.The troubles have gotten in the way of her scholarly work and left her upset. “To then get called names is horrifying. But the fact that it’s name-calling, and the fact that it’s anonymous, discredits what’s being said.” To Lavin, most of this is not about the department, not about solving problems, but about personal attacks and humiliation.

“I’m a young woman -- does that matter here?” she asks. “And I’m not an architect, so I don’t come into this job with any credibility given to me free. I have to earn every drop of it.” She leans forward in her chair assertively. “And it’s not in my nature to be maternal.”

Former dean Weinstein, who describes his own reign as “a horror show of academic politics,” says Lavin has brought the school into the future.

“It’s possible to make buildings that look like this because of the robots,” he says excitedly, pointing at wavy-lined student models carved out of foam by the department’s milling machine. As in the designs Gehry is known for, it’s hard to find right angles: This is all about the curve.

“But we’re just at the beginning of the technology,” he says. “That’s what’s going on at the better schools around the country. This is experimental; it’s incredibly exciting.”

One of Lavin’s key contributions, he explains, has been bringing in faculty and equipment that liberate building from the tyranny of the rectangle, from shapes that are mass-produced or self-similar.

“It’s a social, economic and cultural problem,” Weinstein says. “That’s what architecture is about. But these new tools allow you to conceive the problems in new ways that may help you address it. But we don’t know now. These kinds of shapes have never been seen in building. We’re trying to understand the aesthetics.”

Lavin professes to be looking forward, inspired by loyal students who have printed up “I {heart} AUD” T-shirts. “I am so proud of the first-year class -- it’s the best we’ve ever had,” she says. “They walked into this school and found themselves in a maelstrom. And they have emerged from this as my heroes. They are brave, they’re incredible. They’ve been a salve on a terrible sense of wounding.”

“The PhD students,” she says, “feel they’ve picked the perfect time to be at this school -- that this is where it’s happening. The fact that people are fighting about things shows that ideas matter. Let’s actually talk about the ideological things that divide us. They’re seeing that ideas count.”