Forty or so years ago, before he was a “starchitect”—before anyone called them starchitects—Rem Koolhaas made his mark as a theorist of the city. His 1978 book, Delirious New York, pointed out a fundamental irony of Manhattan: that its rational, officially imposed grid of streets and stacked cubes of apartments allowed, enabled, and even generated the teeming, unruly chaos of urban life that takes place inside its orderly framework.

This wild, polemical celebration of New York, which he called a “retroactive manifesto for Manhattan,” positioned the metropolis as the defining spatial archetype of the 20th century, and for decades it has influenced debates about cities everywhere.

Koolhaas went on to shape many of them. His firm, OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), has excelled at designing buildings that are era-marking symbols in cities around the world—Seattle’s diagonally gridded Central Library in 2004; De Rotterdam, a trio of conjoined towers in the Dutch firm’s hometown in 2013; the monumental public spaces of Qatar National Library in 2017, to name just a few out of dozens.

The firm’s work combines a seductive polish with self-consciously abrupt—sometimes willfully awkward—moves. These gestures often highlight a building’s structure, materials, or context, whether it’s on the scale of Beijing’s CCTV tower (2012), a zigzagging riff on the classic skyscraper, or down to the playfully over designed bathrooms at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2018), which are occasionally as baffling as they are Instagrammable.

For his latest provocation, the celebrated observer of the city has turned his attention everywhere else. With AMO, the research and branding arm of OMA, Koolhaas has organized Countryside, The Future, an exhibition that takes over the rotunda at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on February 20 and runs through the summer. We spoke with Koolhaas about what to expect at the exhibition, the constraints of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling ramp, and contemplating the future of the countryside.

More than four decades after Delirious New York, why are you now turning your attention to the country?

There is something really perverse and one-sided in our current attention, which is completely focused on cities—on smart cities, on technology in cities, on automating cities—and there is a real danger that an entire territory is basically disappearing from our radar.

I’m making an admission of guilt, because I, of course, was very involved in creating scripts and arguments about why the city is so amazing and have done everything to advocate for an urban life. But I started getting nervous when the UN announced that more than 50 percent of people currently live in cities and implied that the percentage of urban dwellers could increase to something like 70 or 80 percent. What is then happening to those who are left behind in the countryside, and how are they supposed to live their lives?

“What started as an almost eccentric effort to look away from cities now has more relevance and urgency because of discussions about climate change and new technology.”
—Rem Koolhaas

How will the exhibition be organized?

The exhibition will show maybe 15 unique situations that are distributed across the world. For instance, thinking about the state apparatus in China and how the countryside in China will be organized in the future, or how the permafrost is melting in the north of Russia. So basically I took an assembly of situations, all extremely different, that hopefully together will give you a sense of how the countryside is faring at this moment—what is possible and what is impossible.

There is also a significant component dedicated to politicians who have treated the countryside as a kind of canvas. From Stalin and Gorbachev, who both considered reversing the course of certain rivers for irrigation, to Hitler, who was imagining how the autobahns could give the average German access to the countryside for the first time, to 10 years later, in 1944, when the Allied forces had to consider what to do with Germany after the war.

But we’re also talking about how Qatar, just a few years ago, created a milk industry almost overnight by importing two and a half thousand cows by airplane and building, in the middle of the desert, a sophisticated production system that has basically changed the course of the entire country.

How will the show respond to Wright’s architecture?

The more we worked on it, the more we were totally intimidated by how the Guggenheim works, because the spiral is in itself a narrative and the galleries are episodes in the narrative. So you could look at it as a movie or as a kind of plot.

Will there be a beginning, middle, and end?

Yeah, inevitably. What started as an almost eccentric effort to look away from cities now has more relevance and urgency because of discussions about climate change and new technology. The hanging question at the end of the exhibition will be how artificiality and a respect for nature—in some new form—are not different options. The two can be merged or can coexist and can mutually influence each other.

So are you optimistic about the future of the countryside?

I’m fundamentally an optimist because I think an architect who is not an optimist is almost obscene.

—

Head back to the January/February 2020 issue homepage

Appears In

Q&A: Architect Rem Koolhaas Turns Our Attention to the Countryside