April 19, 2026
Architecture of Noise 
UIC School of Architecture 2025-26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship


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. An interlaced set of forces which dissolve into one another. This is the dominant contemporary mode of abstraction: rather than alienation and reduction, it's an abstraction of superimposition and density. 

Experiencing this abundance is intense—to continue to make architecture relevant we must align ourselves with this density. Reauthor our history, context and process, 100%. Remake the present and summon its responsibilities and its terrors. This is a call for architecture to recalibrate itself: within crisis, within noise, within its own discipline.

This exhibition presents a constellation of work produced from architecture's caustic limit. A film presenting a conversation between the confused present and a synthetic construction of a Chicago architect, speaking on behalf of all of Chicago’s history. A survey of sites of speculative mass, the final outgrowth of the Chicago School.  An illuminated history of Chicago architecture reinscribing the voices of the present and the past. A new visitors center for the Edith Farnsworth House site and grounds.  A beautiful fountain fed by the discharge from the glass house’s air conditioning system.











Credits:

Nile Greenberg
Douglas A. Garafolo Fellowship 2025-26
University of Illinois Chicago

Abel Nile New York
Michael Abel Deng and Nile Greenberg

Graphic Design:
Michel Egger


Special Thanks:
Robert Somol, Scott Mehaffey, Jayne Kelley, Noel Mercado, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, The Graham Foundation

Exhibition Team

Ali Al-Jawfi
Yasmine Khalil
Dillon Hamann
Dave Kalesz
Johnny Bleibel
Fazil Gurbanzade
Bri Huerta
Muhammad Zegar
Gamid Isaev
Harry Robert Warnaar
Alex Serbanescu 100% Authored

Written and Directed: Nile Greenberg

Jon Daly as Chicago
Joey Whitaker as Present


Nile Greenberg As Director
Gamid Isaev as Script Supervisor

Editor:
Muhammad Zegar

Production Team: 
Muhammad Zegar
Dillon Hamann
Tolu Oluyede
Yasmine Khalil
Gamid Isaev
Fazil Gurbanzade
Daniel Bingsen Zhang
Fabian Ceron
Charlotte Geissler
Harry Warnaar
Rosa Gaia Khuu

Research: 
Gamid Isaev
Alex Serbanescu
Lucy Weisner Fountain

Ali Al-Jawfi
Johnny Bleibel
Fazil Gurbanzade
Dave Kalesz



Visitors Center

Abel Nile New York
Louis Newman
Daniela Osorio Sanudo
Tolu Oluyede
Pearl Chizara Egbuonu
Ian Katamay

April 19, 2026
Architecture of Noise 
UIC School of Architecture 2025-26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship

100% Authored
A dual screen portraying a conversation between the past and present. Present, seated across from Chicago, poses questions for his counterpart. What was the secret rationale behind your confidence? How can the gesamtkunstwek and speculative space work together?  And what is architecture? From the margins of the scene, the director and crew pose commentary and debate the intentions of the dialogue, address issues of the text, and adjust the delivery. Present speaks for today’s questions, Chicago is composed entirely from text assembled for the Art Institute’s Chicago Architects Oral History Project. What plays out is a call for new architecture: an architecture of noise and hollow mass. An architecture beginning at the end.

April 19, 2026
Architecture of Noise 
UIC School of Architecture 2025-26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship


 Speculative Mass

The Chicago School’s great architectural invention united space, structure and speculation. First an extension of the lake’s shore, then the emergence of the Chicago frame and typical plan, the free flowing space of Frank Lloyd Wright and finally Universal Space, Mies van der Rohe’s crystal synthesis. That apex is represented by the Edith Farnsworth House and S.R. Crown Hall. From there the progression appeared to go dark. But Chicago quietly turned to a new phase without steel and glass, a noisy mass of speculative potential. Sites where speculation alone ossified into a silent architectural form, hardened by its potential futures. Stalled by economic and political potential these sites make objects where there none, an extension of the speculative free plan. Is this be the next phase of architects or its end? The basis of the Chicago School is isolated in five case studies. 

April 19, 2026
Architecture of Noise 
UIC School of Architecture 2025-26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship

Illuminated Archive

The production of knowledge often takes place at the margins. Primary sources are stable while the commentary, debate, translation, inscription, gemara, illumination, gloss, minium, graffiti, margienalia, interpretation become techniques to reinscribe the contemporary. In order to construct a new archive together we interrogate canonical history by illuminating it. Fifty oral history interviews were illuminated and displayed in a grid here. 

April 19, 2026
Architecture of Noise 
UIC School of Architecture 2025-26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship


The Farnsworth House is a Fountain, a statue above a reflecting flood. A late debuting air conditioning system for the glass house in the 60s created an excess of condensate discharge offered to a nearby field. A fountain in its place, fed by the overflowing excess water of the glass house. 

March 27, 2026 12:46PM
UIC School of Architecture
2025-26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship








The Edith Farnsworth House
14520 River Rd, Plano, IL 60545

Opening
April 19, 6 p.m.

Open House
April 20, 6 p.m.



Graham Foundation

Thursday, April 23, 6 p.m.


Architecture of Noise

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.

This 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.

February 25, 2026 2:43pm
We are walking through the farnsworth house in minature, but at full scale. Minature in terms of quality.

January 29, 2026 11:47pm
Untitled Farnsworth House Exhibition

The Farnsworth House is a Fountain

December 9, 2025
Masterplan Farnsworth Final Review

University of Illinois Chicago
4th Year Undergraduate Architecture


Students investigate the Edith Farnsworth House in the age of crisis. The question is: in the new epoch of Crisis, where things move slowly and out of sync with time and place, how does architecture approach Crisis, where does it find a site, what is context, once a problem is identified, how do you react?  The Edith Farnsworth House presents a case where students can look at a piece of land, ecology and architecture which is intertwined with forces much larger than its site. These projects ask us to look out of their peripheral vision at the horizon of Crisis and address issues tangentially. 
Students:
Elmir Asadov
Johnny Bleibel
Darice Costea
Pearl Egbuonu
Oliver Flores
Fazil Gurbanzade
Dillon Hamann
Bri Huerta
Niko Kaiteris
Ian Katamay
Yasmine Khalil
Helen Liu
Tolu Oluyede
Dunja Radisavljevic
Diane Romero

Invited Jurors:
Sarah Blankenbaker
Francesco Marullo
Robert Somol
Paul Preissner
Dan Wheeler
Andrew Zago
Barbara Materia
Jayne Kelley
Ania Jaworska
Scott Mehaffey
Mark Stone
Edward Peck

December 5, 2025
The Speculative Pause

I began my Garofalo proposal by understanding Collapse as the force animating the future of Chicago architecture. I was wrong. Something else: a plateau, a pause, a held breath, potential energy, a void. I was entranced by the notion of capturing flows of crisis and understanding its gravity as material for architecture. Despite being poisoned by glass fiberglass deterioration and mold induced by condensation issues in Mies’ glass towers, I see now there is an object of architecture produced by unfinished space rather than the decay of heroic projects. There are voids-objects in the city that are misunderstood as speculative-voids. The famous heroics of Chicago architecture have gone silent, not failed. Leftover potential has congealed into invisible architectural objects, superimposed by potential futures. But at this moment, between speculation and object, we position ourselves. 

Modernism understood that events are objects. A smooth symbiosis between potential actions and objects. But once the temporality changed, so did the object. The unperformed action also becomes an object, but not on a stage like modernism’s event space. Instead it's situated within the formless spaces of potential (plateau, pause, held breath, void…). 

November 17, 2025 12:56pm
100% Authorship 

Chicago Oral Histories

November 3, 2025 7:39pm

September 21, 2025 2:38pm
100% Authorship

We will make a dozen books. 500 Pages ea.

10/24
Carsten Goertz
Neo-Metabolism
Learning to Love the Standard Run, The Real Review 2025
Post-Collapse

The Open Archive
Books

10/31
Book Formats Due

Alain Resnais, Toute la Memoire du Monde
This Will Kill That, Victor Hugo
Umberto Eco, Essay
Vowels Showroom

11/07
Book Analysis Due

11/14
Book Reader Due

The Plateau of the Anti Author
Michael Cohen, Editor Architecture and Abstraction
Architecture and Abstraction, Chapter 6, Pier Vittorio Aureli
Precis of the Lectures on Architecture, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand. Introduction, 77.

11/21
Book Content Due

12/05
Book Proof Due

October 24, 2025 10:00 am
Carsten Goertz

There is so much to figure out.
How to eat in the Crisis
Careful naming conventions 
Read more books, novels

October 19, 2025 (revised October 29, 2025)



Walter Netsch designed the UIC architecture building. A tombstone inscribed with Art and Architecture. But we must begin at the end: after the failures of utopian projects, the loss in faith, the complete transformation of critical practice into capital one, the materials of growth becoming the toxins of decay and deferred maintenance. I keep imagining we are at the end of architecture. It feels like we're at the end of many things. But in the discourse of apocalypse, we begin at the end. There is incredible abundance in the threads of decay, failure and collapse. What is the end? Being in Chicago is testing my faith. Only reinforcing the fact that architecture with legitimacy is the past. And now we serve as not the center of growth, but a mere piece of shrapnel spun off bigger accelerating forms. 

I had this realization. Rather than thinking of crisis as a matter of scale, it has shifted to a matter of density, or thinness, or absorbitive. That crisis is everywhere and it's just a product of how thickly, like smog, it settles in any given object.  Where are we situated in the discipline? This is a profound shift. I think Andres Jaque’s Transcalarity was fascinating once I understood it, as are the digital physical scale games of David Eskenazi. But somehow if Crisis is a mist rather than an object, the way we operate must transition from objects to mist as well. The quality of architects that rely on poetics is to release the thickness of density by acting like it doesn't exist. 

Restate the task: Architecture has lost its ability to analyze architecture. It has developed a set of alternatives to looking at it directly, rather than to reshape, digitize, circulate, and project… But ironically architecture or references themselves have become a shorthand. It looks very “Swiss,” “post-digital,” technooptimist…. I am not thinking clearly. Can illegibility be authored?

Studio Nile Greenberg                Write