ABEL, Michael & GREENBERG, Nile (eds.)
Flash Art Volumes #02 – Crisis Formalism

For its second issue, Flash Art’s yearly review Flash Art Volumes invited Michael Abel and Nile Greenberg of the New York–based architecture practice ANY as guest editors. They have titled this edition “Crisis Formalism.”

“Crisis Formalism” stands on a dual premise: first, that architectural form has lost its immediacy and resonance; second, that contemporary crises require more than reactive solutions. If architects address crises in isolation—whether geopolitical, financial, or environmental—designs unravel under the weight of their interdependencies. Morin warns that fragmented, reductionist thinking produces a blindness that leaves architecture complicit in the very crises it seeks to mitigate. [publishers’ note]

In this issue: Almost Nothing by Edgar Rodriguez; Bayberry Greenhouses: Monumentality and Cropscape by Michelle Deng; Polyconceptual Futures. MILLIØNS’ Zeina Koreitem and John May in Conversation with Michael Abel; Architecture versus the Entropic City. An excerpt of a WhatsApp chat between Preston Scott Cohen and Robert Levit; Archive TOWARDS A CYBERSPACIAL URBAN TERRAIN. Rem Koolhaas in Conversation with Francesco Bonami; Participatory Design or Processual Formalism? Frei Otto, the Ökohaus, and the Ökohäsler by Matthew Kennedy; Race, Property, Rebellion. Cameron Rowland by Hugo Bausch Belbachir; Architectural Universlity in the Age of Global Anomie b+, a case study with quotes from Olaf Grawert, by Reese Lewis; Repairing Shinjuku by Gaku Inoue; Architecture in Crisis in Crisis by Paul Ruppert; ANY: Silvery-Graysh Boxes by Emmett Zeifman; On Skateboarding and Architecture by Jonathan Olivares; Are All Crisis Equal? MOS’ Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample in Conversation with Michael Abel and Nile Greenberg; The Viewing Platform: A Spatial 9/11 Civic Duty (And an Architectural Shock Absorber of “The Right Measure”) by Ewa Roztocka; David Eskenazi: Scaling Collapse by Nile Greenberg; Forms’ Fall from Utopia by Gray Broderick; Unknown Architects. The Arbeitsrat für Kunst and the German Revolution 1918–19 by Phillip Denny; Who Are These People? Kai Althoff in Conversation with Carlo Antonelli; Cyprien Gaillard's Dance Macabre by Ben Broome; Total Warfare. Luigi Alberto Cippini in Conversation with Michael Abel and Nile Greenberg; Echoes in Motion. CLOCKS’ Mahfuz Sultan in Conversation with Michael Abel; Survival Architecture: Within Crisis by Michaela Friedberg.

Published by Flash Art, 2025
Periodicals / Architecture