Flash Art Volumes #2: Crisis Formalism

For its second issue, 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.”

If we recognize that architecture is at a tipping point – in which form, once immediate and vital, risks dissolving into a haze of proliferating crises – then the moment calls for a fundamental rethinking of form itself, not as an outcome of crisis but as its very cause. Crisis has long unsettled architecture: modernists, postmodernists, deconstructivists, and parametricists each declared a state of emergency in which the discipline faltered. Still, a recurring twentieth-century question remains: Can architecture act politically in response to crisis – whether in housing, civic identity, or technological shifts?

Today’s crises, however, are entangled in broader complexities. The contemporary world is defined by what French philosopher Edgar Morin termed “polycrisis” –– a web of interlinked emergencies that confound both institutional structures and inherited architectural frameworks. Whereas architecture once aspired to generate stable meaning, today’s swirl of economic, environmental, and political disruptions has undermined that assumption. In response, some retreat from architecture into policy, finance, or material logistics. Yet, rather than diminishing architecture’s cultural potency, these challenges invite a renewed engagement with form.