Exhibition Review: Countryside, The Future - Guggenheim
Workers at Koppert Cress check movable growing tables in a year-round greenhouse. Photographer: Luca Locatelli
More than half the world’s population now lives in urban centers and the countryside is getting increasingly depopulated because of new machinery and automated work methods. At the same time cities are filling more and more in our public consciousness—especially when we think of success—whereas the countryside becomes ever more forgotten.
This fact inspired the world-renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to analyze the countryside and its meanings in our urbanizing world. The result is a tour de force through the history, economy, architecture, and philosophy of the countryside where Koolhaas shows how surprisingly dynamic and multifaceted the countryside is.
Laurian Ghinitoiu courtesy AMO
A central thesis of the exhibition is that our current form of urban life has necessitated the organization, abstraction, and automation of the countryside at an unprecedented scale. Data storage, fulfillment centers, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, robotic automation, worker migration, and the private purchase of land for ecological preservation are in many cases more actively explored and experimented within the countryside than the city.
The countryside has undergone dramatic change from an idealized place admired and praised by ancient philosophers as the place for happiness to a place filled up with industrial agriculture and gigantic warehouses. Tesla’s Gigafactory in the desert of Nevada is one of those structures that transcends human architecture and becomes a structure of, by, and for things—not people. Koolhaas’ sees these factories as contemporary versions of the sublime—something that overwhelms us with sheer grandeur and otherworldliness.
Laurian Ghinitoiu courtesy AMO
Tesla’s Gigafactory
To Rem Koolhaas, the countryside asserts itself as the laboratory where people can dream and experiment with radical ideas. The examples Koolhaas gives range from utopian hippie societies to NAZI policies in the 1930s and from Thomas Jefferson’s grid plan of America to the squatter settlement in the Californian desert known as Slab City, which was formed based on the Jeffersonian grid.
The exhibition leaves one perplexed about what the countryside really is. But in light of the current pandemic one thing is for sure, the countryside now again seems to be a place where people are attracted to live—just as long as they can connect to Netflix and Zoom with high enough bandwidth in order to escape it again. No matter what, the exhibition makes one question the future of human habitation. As Koolhaas puts it: “The inevitability of Total Urbanization must be questioned and the countryside must be rediscovered as a place to resettle, to stay alive.”
The exhibition runs through 14 February 2021
