I’ve been thinking about art deco. The style recently turned 100, and after it arrived via the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, its influence quickly proliferated around the world: One can see its streamline sensibility in New York’s skyline; hotels that line Miami Beach; bus stations across the U.S.; the UNESCO-designated World Heritage city of Asmara, Eritrea; in Mumbai, India; and the Kavanagh Building in Buenos Aires, among other venues. It has a syncretic, catholic vibe in that its geometric directives were combined with vernacular material cultures to create distinct local varieties. Art deco’s optimistic eclecticism absorbed the aesthetic flourishes of art nouveau and cubism alongside rapid transformations in building technology. It arrived in a moment of societal change: Just four years after its eponymous fair, squarely in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, the great crash struck in 1929. (The resulting depression contributed in part to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.) In my view, art deco embodies the aspirations of a society that was rapidly concentrating capital, which makes sense that it is experiencing a comeback today. Our current moment bears a striking resemblance to that time: We too have emerged from a global pandemic, are dealing with the rise of fascism, and are grappling with extreme wealth inequality. Architects of that era were responding to rapid changes in technology, just as contemporary practitioners are now. But we have the added anxiety of the climate crisis. While art deco’s formal exuberance was revelatory, these days the same showy flourishes often land as wasteful, overwrought, even lame. Which is to say: Architecture’s long capital-P Project of exploring ever-more-complicated forms has finally come to an end. The heroic pursuit of formal complexity for its own sake feels like a bygone thing. The urgent question is not “Can we build it?” but “Should we build it?” Our technology is sufficiently advanced that all manner of shapes and assemblies are within our reach to imagine, though having the money or construction ability to realize them is another story entirely. This provocation is in part the premise of “Crisis Formalism,” a smart issue of Flash Art Volumes guest edited by Michael Abel and Nile Greenberg of the New York–based ANY, a partnership in architecture, scenography, theory, and design. Their introduction begins: “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.” ANY’s contents help us exit the tailspin of architecture’s sublime uselessness, in Manfredo Tafuri’s description. We can move beyond the caveman logic: If form bad and architect make form, then… architecture bad? Uh, not really. Architects should still make things, but perhaps they should be making maintenance plans or organization charts or business plans or adaptive reuse scenarios or affordable housing. Making form is necessary but easy; it’s the rest of the stuff that is hard. What’s needed is a deeper, more thoughtful accounting of form’s impacts, material flows, and complicities. We ought to train ourselves to see form’s shadow. Robert Wilson’s Parzival: A Chair with a Shadow (Martien Mulder) Theater artist Robert Wilson does exactly this with Parzival: A Chair with a Shadow, the chair pictured above as photographed by Martien Mulder. The seat includes a built version of its shadow. “A chair and its shadow—and its shadow’s shadow” and, correspondingly, “the shadow’s shadow—and its chair,” Dung Ngo writes at the end of Robert Wilson: Chairs, a new book published by Ngo’s August Editions and Raisonné. Wilson’s chairs become characters in his plays, so this new publication documents his cast of furniture. This resonates. Wilson, who earned a degree in architecture at Pratt after landing in Brooklyn from his hometown of Waco, Texas, writes in the introduction: “I never thought of theater design as decoration, but as something architectural.” Across this issue, we are on a search for the rationales beneath form, from our news to features on material uses to a Focus section on facade expertise to a Q&A about the future of museums to an excerpt from Sérgio Ferro’s forthcoming book. Much like a century ago, with everything going on in the world, it feels like the right time to press ahead—not to discard architecture’s value but to reexamine what anchors it in our wider culture. It’s like the opening of the poem “Tear It Down” by Jack Gilbert: “We find out the heart only by dismantling what / the heart knows.” Later, a line of welcome direction: “We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.”