Nile Greenberg: Architecture of Noise

Nile Greenberg presents Architecture of Noise, his research as the 2025–26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) School of Architecture. Greenberg asserts that the present is a battery—that we preside over a time of noise, not signal and noise, not the noise of the past, but a gesamtkunstwerk of noise: every inch authored by someone.

Through projects and research developed at UIC, he examines how architecture can operate within overlapping crises—environmental, economic, and political—where control is often dispersed across many actors and systems. Architecture must author and reauthor its contexts and sites, remake the present, and confront its responsibilities and its risks. Greenberg positions this as a call for architecture to recalibrate itself within crisis, within noise, and within its history.

This talk follows the exhibition of Architecture of Noise at the Edith Farnsworth House (April 19–20), which brings together a series of projects: a film; a reimagined history of Chicago; a survey of sites shaped by environmental and economic forces; a visual survey of Chicago architecture; and a new masterplan for the Farnsworth House.

Related Exhibition:

The Edith Farnsworth House, 14520 River Rd, Plano, IL 60545
Opening: Sunday, April 19, 4–6 p.m.
Open House: Monday, April 20, 2–6 p.m.

Nile Greenberg is a founding partner of Abel Nile New York. Abel Nile New York guest edited the 2025 issue of Flash Art Volumes on the theme of Crisis Formalism—a dossier of architectural responses to re-integrate architectural form and crisis. Greenberg serves as architecture editor at The Brooklyn Rail, overseeing a section that focuses on the relationship between architecture and art. His published works include coauthoring The Advanced School of Collective Feeling (Park Books, 2023), a study on the relationship between physical culture and housing in the 1920 and curating the exhibition Two Sides of the Border at Yale. Greenberg is the 2025-26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow at University of Illinois Chicago. He has taught at University of Illinois Chicago; Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP); and Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP). His work has been presented at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; ETH Zürich, Zurich; Spazio Maiocchi, Milan; Center for Architecture, New York; Rice University, Houston; Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge; University of Melbourne, Melbourne; and The Cooper Union, New York Greenberg was recognized as New Practices New York 2020-23 by American Institute of Architects, New York (AIANY).

About the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship
Named in honor of architect and educator Doug Garofalo (1958–2011), this nine-month teaching fellowship provides emerging designers the opportunity to teach studio and seminar courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs and conduct independent design research. The fellowship also includes a public lecture at the Graham Foundation and an exhibition at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) School of Architecture. To learn more about the fellowship, click here.

Presented in partnership with the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture
Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or [email protected] to make arrangements.

Image: Architecture of Noise (model), 2026. Photo: Nile Greenberg

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