Events

The present is a battery. 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. We must author and reauthor our contexts and sites. We must remake the present and summon its responsibilities and its terrors. A call for architecture to recalibrate itself: within crisis, within noise, within its history.

2025–26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow Nile Greenberg exhibition, staged at the Edith Farnsworth House, presents a constellation of work produced from architecture’s caustic limit. A film: a conversation between the present and a synthetic Chicago history. A survey of sites of speculative mass. An illuminated history of Chicago architecture. A new masterplan for the Farnsworth House itself.

Following the exhibition’s opening, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts hosts a lecture by Nile Greenberg, who will elaborate on his creative process and discuss the conceptual and theoretical framework of his research.

Exhibition
Sunday, April 19, at 4–6 pm (opening)
Monday, April 20, at 2–6 pm (open house)
The Edith Farnsworth House
14520 River Rd, Plano, IL 60545

Lecture (RSVP required)
Thursday, April 23, 6 pm
Graham Foundation 
4 West Burton Place, 
Chicago, Illinois, 60610

Nile Greenberg is a founding partner of Abel Nile New York. Abel Nile New York guest edited the 2025 issue of Flash Art Volumeson the theme of Crisis Formalism—a dossier of architectural responses to re-integrate architectural form and crisis. Nile serves as Architecture Editor at The Brooklyn Rail, overseeing a section that focuses on the relationship between architecture and art. His published works include co-authoring 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. Nile is the 2025-26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow at University of Illinois Chicago. He has taught at University of Illinois Chicago, Columbia University GSAPP and Cornell University AAP. His work has been presented at the 2025 Venice Biennale, Midway Contemporary Art, ETH Zürich, Spazio Maiocchi, the AIA Center for Architecture, Rice University, Harvard GSD, University of Melbourne, The Cooper Union… Abel Nile New York was recognized as New Practices New York 2020-2023 by AIANY. 

About the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship
Named in honor of the award-winning architect and educator Doug Garofalo (1958–2011), the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship is an annual nine-month visiting faculty teaching-and-research fellowship that provides an emerging designer the opportunity to teach studio and seminar courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs and conduct independent design research. During its second semester, the fellowship includes a public lecture at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and an exhibition.

Note: The lecture at the Graham Foundation 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 them at (312) 787-4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Figure credit: Architecture of Noise (model), 2026. Photo by Nile Greenberg.