The Countryside, The Future exhibition opened on Thursday at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. The theme outlined by the author of the exposition, Dutch architect, urbanist, theorist, professor and co-founder of the Rotterdam Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and its AMO think tank Rem Koolhaas, shifts the current emphasis of our time to new ones, which we have not devoted before., in his opinion, due attention. Throughout the 20th century, we were told that the future is outside the city and that a modern architect should serve its improvement. And at this exhibition everything is about the village. She has a lot of things that threaten her and it is literally necessary to do something about it all today. Architecture as such has completely faded into the background, the speech, no less, about the salvation of mankind. But first things first - Koolhaas' detailed study of the transformation of the village became the subject of his new book "Countryside, A Report" - "Rural Landscape: A Report" - in the publishing house Taschen, as well as the aforementioned exhibition, which opened in the Guggenheim on February 20 and will be available in over the next six months, through the end of summer.
The exhibition Rural Landscape: The Future was organized by Troy Konrad Terrien, the first curator of the Department of Architecture and Digital Initiatives of the Guggenheim Museum, in collaboration with Koolhaas and AMO Director Samir Banthal, to explore the impact of new technologies, culture, politics, as well as various phenomena, from the influx of refugees to Europe before real estate speculation and, of course, climate change - to the radical transformation of villages around the world. In collecting, processing and presenting information, which took about five years, Koolhaas and his office were also assisted by students from universities in the USA, Holland, China, Kenya, and Japan. A total of about 180 people.
Even before acquaintance with the content of the exhibition, the question may arise - why exactly an architect, and an urbanist, undertook to tell us all about the rural landscape of the future? Architects are not futurists, sociologists, anthropologists, or even scientists at all. They are trusted to make our world more orderly, meaningful and, of course, beautiful. However, it is the architects who are perhaps better than anyone else who are able to cope with at least two tasks. First, they are great at collecting and analyzing data. And secondly, no one can compete with them in the skill of presenting the most amazing projects in the most inspiring and authoritative way. After all, architects are constantly dealing with the future. In addition, architects, representatives of almost the last universal profession, like journalists, often tackle topics in which they understand little. And at the end of the project, they understand the subject better than any specialists. The future presented at the exhibition is stunning in its volume and details, so visitors will have to spend many hours here, even for a superficial acquaintance.
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zooming 1/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City Photo © Laurian Ghinitoiu / Courtesy of AMO
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zooming 2/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City Photo © Laurian Ghinitoiu / Courtesy of AMO
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zooming 3/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City Photo © Laurian Ghinitoiu / Courtesy of AMO
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zooming 4/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City Photo © Laurian Ghinitoiu / Courtesy of AMO
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zooming 5/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City Photo © Laurian Ghinitoiu / Courtesy of AMO
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zooming 6/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City Photo © Laurian Ghinitoiu / Courtesy of AMO
What better metaphor for the future than a spiral ?! The famous Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda, coiled in a spiral, has always caused a lot of controversy and inconvenience among artists and curators. However, the Koolhaas show fits her like a hand to a glove. Climbing a continuous six-level ramp, we find ourselves in an endless collage stream of quotes, illustrations, maps, graphs, films, archival materials and art reproductions about the rural landscape from a variety of spheres - from mythology, history and politics to ecology, technology and statistics. …
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zooming 1/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
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zooming 2/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
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zooming 3/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
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zooming 4/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
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zooming 5/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
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zooming 6/6 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
We are presented with examples of grandiose agricultural programs from China during the Mao era, the Soviet Union of Stalin and Khrushchev, Nazi Germany and the democratic United States of America, among others. And all this is accompanied by waterfalls of wall texts using a font specially designed for the exhibition, which looks a little shaky and as if it was written by hand. Endless material immerses us in the world of the village - what it was like, what it has become and what to expect from it in the near future.
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zooming 1/9 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo © Vladimir Belogolovsky
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zooming 2/9 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo © Vladimir Belogolovsky
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zooming 3/9 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo © Vladimir Belogolovsky
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zooming 4/9 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo © Vladimir Belogolovsky
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zooming 5/9 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo © Vladimir Belogolovsky
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zooming 6/9 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo © Vladimir Belogolovsky
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zooming 7/9 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo © Vladimir Belogolovsky
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zooming 8/9 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo © Vladimir Belogolovsky
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zooming 9/9 Countryside, The Future. Rem Koolhaas exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York Photo © Vladimir Belogolovsky
So before us appears a cluster of giant, devoid of any aesthetics industrial hangars called the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center (TRIC) in the Nevada desert. It is the largest industrial park in the world and supports leading technology companies in Silicon Valley. Their appearance was facilitated by tax breaks and a simplified process for obtaining a building permit. We are told about a grid that Thomas Jefferson proposed, projected onto undeveloped "wild" lands. She divides them into squares of 640 acres each - a square mile or 2.6 km2 - for simplified measurement, use and sale of farms.
We learn about the melting of permafrost and the accelerated emission of greenhouse gases in Eastern Siberia, which significantly accelerates global warming. China-funded infrastructure projects in Africa and many other studies on gentrification, energy conservation, heritage conservation, leisure and escapism, commercialization, popular culture, and so on. Modern technology is represented by electric cars, drones, satellites and tractors, one of which is parked right in front of the entrance to the museum on Fifth Avenue next to an airtight container that almost completely blocks the sidewalk so that passers-by will pay attention to growing tomatoes in a controlled microclimate under the Martian pink rays LED lamps.
From the very beginning, Koolhaas announced that this exhibition had nothing to do with either art or architecture. Indeed, you will not find architectural projects and original works of art here. Then why are all these facts and stories on display in such a significant art museum? What exactly is the role of an art museum today? If we accept curator Hans Ulrich Obrist's observation that art is not an object but a statement, then there is no contradiction here. On the contrary, where else should the most pressing topics be put up for discussion, which would provoke serious discussions? After all, it is the art museums that attract the greatest attention of the interested public today. In this sense, modern museums have replaced medieval temples. Increasingly, we turn to museums for a variety of reasons; admiring something beautiful on a pedestal is just one of them. Museums are no longer passive spaces where objects accumulate; they draw our attention to the most interesting and provocative ideas, and the way this is done is continually questioned and transformed.
But let's take a closer look at the presentation of the exhibition. In the very first photo, we see Koolhaas from the back, peering into the mountain distances in front of him. And the very first sentence under this photo reads like this: “Over the past ten years, I have been collecting material and information on a topic that is currently completely ignored. It's about the rural landscape. Following on, we constantly snatch from the general information flow his stories from the first person, and at the very top awaits us a huge photograph of Koolhaas in full growth and again from behind, this time surrounded by a group of people. He looks at the endless desert space of Nevada, and everyone else looks there and at him. There is a feeling that it is on him that the hope is pinned, that it is he who must save the village all over the world. Such a frankly personified presentation of the material was chosen consciously and very artistically. And such an installation could not be presented anywhere except in an art museum.
The Guggenheim exhibition is not exactly a prediction, but rather a warning - what if the rural landscape continues to be developed without architects? This seemingly endless territory is becoming more and more technologically progressive, and buildings and spaces are turning into deserted, automated spaces. We observe how nature gradually becomes flatter, more orderly and almost alien. The whole world is transforming into something hybrid - between city and country. All this is the result of the great migration to the cities. According to the UN, in 2007, for the first time in history, the population of cities equaled the population of rural areas, and has continued to increase since then. Experts are sounding the alarm, stating that more than half of earthlings now live in cities. Is it bad, is it good, and what actually needs to be done about this? Koolhaas found his own original answer. He concluded the following: “Half of the people on earth live in cities. But the remaining half do not live in them. And while the urban half occupies 2% of the total area, the rural population occupies the remaining area, which is 98%! What should we pay more attention to? The conclusion suggests itself.
Today, Koolhaas says that he is interested in the village for the same reason that he paid attention to New York in the 1970s - no one else was interested. In this, of course, there is a certain contradiction - if Koolhaas faced so much evidence of such a fundamental transformation of the village, this only indicates that a large number of people are already paying great attention to this! Thus, we are rather dealing with his own unexpected discovery of the village. Let's take another look at the new buildings in the Nevada desert, or rather, at their novelty through the eyes of Koolhaas. There is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about these faceless boxes. Why, in fact, should we give them any attention? Koolhaas says they are solely designed around codes, algorithms, technology, engineering and operational data. They have no idea, no intention of the creator. He means that there is no artistic element in them. In other words, they are not designed by an architect. He says these giant sheds are boring and commonplace. He hints that architects would have done a much better job of this. What he really worries about is that architects have long lost control in the cities, and now we have a lot of evidence that the village can easily do without them. He wants to challenge this development of events, and at the same time save the profession.
It has long become the norm when politicians, developers and entrepreneurs are the first to start building in cities. Buildings have evolved into predictable, formula-driven commercial projects. Even to create iconic objects, architects are often invited to a stage when all key decisions have already been made - functions, volume, circulation, or, for example, the number of apartments on a floor. More and more often, architects only get to decorate the facades. And how many projects are created without the participation of architects at all? According to statistics, they are 98%. But many are happy with such a fate. Cesar Pelly said: "Architecture can fit in a quarter of an inch." There is even something poetic about it. The problem is that often architecture is limited to a quarter of an inch. Many architects today are full of hopes that it is in the village, from where so many have left for the cities, that they will be able to realize their utopias, built from scratch. It's so addicting. Just imagine - to build an alternative future!
But in fact, architects have been working outside the city for a long time. For example, this is where many independent bureaus in China have rushed, unable to compete with giant state design institutes or leading international offices, such as OMA itself, which the Chinese authorities invite to realize their most daring urban ambitions. As a result, many Chinese bureaus have succeeded in building small, attractive facilities in the province, where they operate far from the bosses' eyes. These intriguing buildings, often built with regional skills and materials in mind, confront the so-called global architecture, which tends to ignore the local climate and cultural traditions. This approach attracts widespread approval from the most picky critics. Today this phenomenon has become a global trend and many international architects are already actively looking for opportunities for the construction of small structures of social importance in the most remote places, often in other countries and even continents. Architects discover authenticity in themselves through the "roots" of specific places, moving away from the recently popular trend - to invent their own artistic language.
It is difficult to say definitely whether today the village needs more attention than the city. No solid evidence of this has been presented to us. On the contrary, we know of the ongoing great migration of hundreds of millions of Chinese to cities and the predictions that urban centers in India and Africa will become mega-cities of 50-80 million inhabitants by the end of this century. There is no doubt that it is necessary to pay attention to the village, but not at the expense of ignoring our cities. Both the countryside and the cities are undergoing tremendous transformations, and we urgently need to tackle them in the most serious way. Why stress the difference between the two? More than forty years ago, Koolhaas began his career with the publication of the urban manifesto “Delirious New York,” “New York is beside itself,” which, by the way, was also presented at the Guggenheim Museum. Now Koolhaas has written his new manifesto - about the village. His observations are valuable now that if architects can refer to both, they will be better equipped to work on a wide variety of projects, no matter where they are. And thanks to Koolhaas, we drew attention to the fact that a comprehensive research view of an architect can be not only urban, that is, it can be turned not only to the city. What's next? I would like to know more about the projects that Koolhaas is currently working on. There is no doubt that they will soon appear outside the cities. And why should serious architecture be created on an area of only 2%, when, it turns out, there is so much space on earth ?!
Vladimir Belogolovsky - critic and curator, author of ten books, including Iconic New York, Architectural Guide (DOM, 2019) and Conversations with Architects in the Age of Celebrity (DOM, 2015). Lives in New York.
