The Tree Is the Generator

On Tuesday night, Princeton professor Sylvia Lavin kicked off the e-flux architecture lecture series at the platform’s new Classon Avenue space. Her talk, informed by material from her forthcoming book on trees, was a focused inquiry into Cedric Price’s Generator project (1976–80), which imagined a kind of kinetic cultural complex for White Oak Plantation in northwest Florida. Lavin emphasized certain aspects of the project’s supple program, involving simple modular enclosures set amid a vast forested swamp that could be endlessly reconfigured to suit visitors’ desires. She also made compelling narrative use of the Generator’s conceptual and material pedigree: Price’s client was Howard Gilman, the chairman of the Gilman Paper Company and New York arts philanthropist. (The opera house at BAM bears his name.) Invoking the “generative” forces of nonlabor and labor-intensive activities, Lavin paradoxically highlighted the material agency of the unconscious. She went on to elucidate other elements of the scheme (e.g., a historical slave hut that evaded Price’s grid plan) …