Architecture is becoming blurry.
What do architects make now?
Text: Nile Greenberg (Architect)
Nile Greenberg
Abel Nile New York
Architecture Editor The Brooklyn Rail
Criticism is the diagnosis of the medium: addressing history’s spectators, defining the terms of the medium, validating assumptions, and establishing a popular understanding of it.
There are acts that architecture as a medium still performs, and they are constantly rewritten to suit the present. Architectural criticism needs to focus on the unstable realm of architectural authorship. This is where to look in order to see buildings for what they are. What are architects doing when they design? Which of those actions result in the final outcome? What, or who, does that outcome serve?
We do not lack architectural criticism today. We lack its relevance and impact. Architecture is hard to see at this moment, and so it is unclear what we are writing about when we write about architecture. It is this loss of sight that I believe needs to be addressed, and criticism, which is the act of sight, is a starting point.
Most contemporary criticism uses the building as an alibi for the real subject: everything else. Decades of critical thought have been put into the exegesis of architecture: the supply chains and carbon footprint, its historic lineages and canonical rereadings, disciplinary categories, its financialization, its demolition, or its impact once built. Each offers some truth. But architecture is no longer easy to see as a medium itself, but rather an accumulation of other things.
If all this information makes architecture blurrier, criticism has become even more untethered from the architectural form. This is for good reason, as architecture itself is grappling with the same moral and financial pressures to erase itself on behalf of perceived greater actions.
In order to see architecture clearly, do not look at the architect as a master-builder, rather look at what governs the built world and where does an architect and a building perform? Looking fearlessly into that space of authorship. It’s hard to see and constantly changing, but this plane is where architecture’s contours exist. From there, criticism can be meaningful.
Nile Greenberg
Nile Greenberg is a founding partner of Abel Nile New York. ANY recently 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. Nile serves as Architecture Editor at The Brooklyn Rail, overseeing a section that focuses on the relationship between architecture and art. Nile was the 2025-26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow at University of Illinois Chicago where he presented the exhibition "Architecture of Noise," at the Edith Farnsworth House and the Graham Foundation, on our epoch of noisy abstraction. 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. He has taught at Columbia University GSAPP and Cornell University AAP. His work has been presented at the 2025 Venice Biennale, ETH Zürich, Cornell University, Spazio Maiocchi, the AIA Center for Architecture, Rice University, Harvard GSD, University of Melbourne, The Cooper Union, University of Colorado.... ANY was recognized as New Practices New York 2020-2023 by AIANY.