Allan Greenberg is a prominent architect and scholar who has championed the relevance of classical and traditional architecture in his teaching, writing, and designs. Unlike his peers, Greenberg’s stance and talents were formed outside of the American academy. Indeed, the strength of his work and its influence have taken shape in ways that rarely mirror the trends in postwar American architectural theory.

The education he received in an undergraduate architecture program in his native South Africa is unique, based off a pedagogic model that was completely excised by the 1960s in American universities. The equivalent of an education based on the great books, Greenberg’s studies were focused on the key monuments of architectural history. But rather than examining these through the lens of theory or the abstracted narratives of the architectural historian, Greenberg was forced to learn how to summon these buildings—hundreds of them—to draw them to scale from memory.

Greenberg’s studies were focused on the key monuments of architectural history.

The facility that he carried into the early years of his career—his ability to draw architecture that had been largely ignored—equipped him to challenge modernist doctrines without resorting to intellectual props. He is a talent whose knowledge could have made him an interesting anachronism but, armed with his singular skills, he has driven his argument by demonstrating that the traditions he had so preciously mastered were not specters of a moribund past. Instead, his work shows them to be the vital key to both understanding