Starchitect Rem Koolhaas Makes the Case for Leaving Cities Behind

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- People have romanticized the countryside as long as there have been cities. From the ancient Roman poet Horace to German expressionists to the American communes of the 1970s, there’s an ongoing perception that the countryside represents an innocent agrarian past, whereas cities, built on sophisticated commerce, represent the technocentric future.

It’s not just a question of sentimentality. Metropolitan living does seem like the way forward, especially among proponents of environmental sustainability. The carbon footprint of a household in the center of a large, dense city is about half the national average, according to a 2014 study by the University of California at Berkeley, and households in suburbs are as much as twice the average.

But the theory that big cities are our manifest destiny is being challenged by the starchitect Rem Koolhaas in the exhibition “Countryside, the Future,” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York through Aug. 14. “The inevitability of Total Urbanization must be questioned,” Koolhaas writes in an accompanying catalog, “and the countryside must be rediscovered as a place to resettle, to stay alive.” This notion will have particular resonance in the age of the new coronavirus, as urban crowds have become synonymous with contagion. The Guggenheim is closed until further notice for this very reason, making Koolhaas’s message strikingly urgent.

The six levels of the rotunda are broken into sections, including one called “Political Redesign” that looks at case studies around the globe in which the countryside was modified through sociopolitical machinations. In it, there are anecdotes about Nazi Germany, plus a story about Moammar Qaddafi’s successful project to create the largest irrigation system in the world by transporting water through 1,750 miles of pipeline.

Another section, “(Re-)Population,” finds people who left the city for the country. One such narrative relates how Manheim, a town in Germany that abuts an open coal mine, was evacuated as the mine expanded. The village became a ghost town until Germany moved Syrian refugees into its ancient, empty houses. The refugees, the text tells us, “made the village look like an optimistic, heterogeneous, globalized version of the German countryside.”

Most of the exhibition is text accompanied by props both illustrative and decorative. On a pillar dedicated to toys and books, Playmobil tractor sets are mounted on the wall. “The smallest toy farm or police squad or children’s book reveals more about the fears and hopes of a society than many sociological studies,” reads the text.

The show was curated by the Guggenheim’s Troy Conrad Therrien and organized in collaboration with AMO, a research studio spun out of Koolhaas’s firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). It’s not prescriptive: Visitors aren’t likely to find new ideas about sociology, let alone mass deforestation or species collapse. Instead, the show aims to capture the current state of life outside cities. “Given [the] countryside’s enormity, this portrait can only be pointillist,” Koolhaas writes.

There’s a recurring theme of compare and contrast: A picture of women in traditional peasant clothes from 1909 is set against another image of a pink-lit mega-greenhouse from 2017. “THEN,” reads text overset on the first image. “NOW,” reads the next. We’re supposed to be dazzled by the change, but mostly you’ll be struck by how the labeling, font, and depth of insight conjures HSBC’s decade-old “Different Values” advertising campaign.

Anyone looking for profundity, or anything they can’t find on Wikipedia, will likely come away disappointed. The show often takes a bemused, wide-eyed approach to rural life that presupposes its audience is as ignorant as the urbane Koolhaas, whose interest in the countryside came about when he decided his Swiss vacation town had become too gentrified. “When I first went there 20 years ago, the village was small. Since then, the inhabitants left, but the village grew. It’s now three times bigger,” he says in a statement at the base of the Guggenheim ramp. “How can a village empty and grow at the same time?”

Sentiments like these make the show feel oddly dated, a jumble of insights that don’t stand up to scrutiny (for example: “The sea is the new countryside”). The format might work in a management consultant’s strategy deck, but a museum, particularly one with such global stature, should aim higher.

And yet it’s notable that “Countryside, the Future” exists at the Guggenheim at all. It’s a testament to the institution’s commitment to nontraditional art and ideas but also a devastating internal contradiction: If the countryside is our future, what’s it doing in a museum?

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