The Office of Metropolitan Architecture's (OMA) much-anticipated exhibition, Countryside, The Future, is set to open next week at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
The exhibition, according to the museum website, explores "radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories collectively identified here as 'countryside,' or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities, with a full rotunda installation premised on original research."
The exhibition is organized by OMA co-founder Rem Koolhaas, AMO director Samir Bantal, The Guggenheim's Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives Troy Conrad Therrien, and others. It features research and contributions from students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design; the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Wageningen University, Netherlands; and the University of Nairobi.
According to a recent article in The Guardian from UK architecture critic Oliver Wainwright, Koolhaas got the idea for the exhibition "while visiting a brothel on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada," where he was being toured around the Nevada desert by Lance Gilman, a real estate developer who recently pivoted away from adult entertainment and toward massive, anonymous technology distribution warehouses.
It was here that, according to Wainwright, it dawned on Koolhaas that the world's countrysides were experiencing significant typological and economic shifts that might make for interesting architecture research.
Koolhaas tells Wainwright, “It is a fantastically beautiful landscape with rolling hills and wild horses. And in the middle of it all were these colossal structures, placed in a way that didn’t seem to suggest any coherence or sign of human inhabitation.”
The Guggenheim exhibition will make use of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building's elliptical, sloping gallery spaces to present a continuous exhibition that investigates the massive change taking place within the parts of the world that are not urbanized in the traditional sense, areas that serve cities through their energy generation, agricultural, internet-supporting, and labor-supplying functions, according to OMA. The pivot toward the countryside and away from cities mirrors another recent rhetorical and conceptual shift for the firm toward issues of historic preservation.
Koolhaas tells Wainwright, "At a certain point, the UN declared that half of mankind is now living in cities, since when there has been an avalanche of books and biennales talking only about cities. As a result, there is an enormous deficit in understanding what is happening in the countryside, which is where the truly radical changes are taking place.”
30 Comments
I liked Delirious New York and I expect the show to be a very good representation that wakes people up to see what consumption does to the land. I hope it travels around to all cities to wake people out of their trance of hyper digital consumerism.
Still seems to accept the binary of urban vs. rural. In reality the two are the same. Koolhaas has always been good at using media as a form of self-promotion in bypassing critical structures (where are now non-existent).
Not sure if we're talking about the same thing but in the past year or so I've been really captivated by the idea of "rural urbanism" or "small urbanism" but haven't been able to put it into the right words.
It’s an interesting and important concept. From what I’ve seen here it looks like a patronizing NYT elite style journalist take on rural life. Aiming at Koolhaasian vulgarity and hyperbole, becoming a caricature. Used to be cute in the 90s, but now just seems lame to me.
Ends up looking like a sad attempt to stay in the conversation of NY-LA real estate developers
Realization: Rem has always had Mugatu tendencies, but here he is finally going full Derelicte .... (and self-parody, considering he was a contributor to the urbanism-fetish discourse, now replaced with country-fetish post 2016)
My wife and I bought a house last year in the walkable historic district of a small city (~30k) outside of Portland. There's a train downtown that doesn't run frequently enough and doesn't stop in enough other cities. There are buses, and a light rail 10 minutes north. There's so much potential for this & adjacent cities' old downtowns to become hotbeds of aging millennial activity, if only there was a *little bit better* transit & *a slightly more* pedestrian friendly attitude. Thinking about making this my life's work. Dovetails nicely with architecture.
Not my city but nearby:
This could be 30-40 minutes from downtown Portland if a train stopped here. The tracks are already in place. This is what the US should be building for. Rural yet walkable. Small but dense. Affordable but accessible.
Rationalizing your move to the suburbs/exurbs? Good schools! Low crime! Family-friendly! I get it - we all get old.
Nope.
I would not describe where I live as "suburban" but there are lots of conflicting definitions of suburban.
I'm intrigued with this as well, tduds. The larger our cities grow—and more expensive—the more we spread out, the more we need to find centers away from the downtown. The first challenge is finding something that will bring people to the area in some meaningful way, and I fear that is problematic. Retail has declined and is iffy, and it's hard to get people out of the house.
https://returningcenter.wordpr...
I'm engaged in a similar project, virtual and personal. It's a diversion. More thoughts and designs follow the first post, which I wrote for the neighborhood. I live in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, once a separate town. This area has history, is quite walkable and pleasant, and has plenty of people nearby. Yet the downtown area is stalling or declining. Much commercial space is vacant and enterprises come and go. I suggest a satellite college because if there's demand—and I have no idea if there is—it will bring a steady stream of people to the area, hundreds daily, who might use the restaurants and cafes. If not this, what would work? This needs serious study.
Also I suggest a terrific site. The above only a block away. It's on a plaza, accessible and close to everything. A well designed building would have significant cultural and esthetic impact, just as the bridge has. My designs, of course are rough—I'm not an architect—though I like several. I thought this would be a great student project for an architecture department and have approached several, without result.
The solution proposed in St. Johns, now zoned for four stories, and elsewhere, is mixed-use. It's not working here and isn't, I suspect, elsewhere. Someone needs to rethink the plan. I talk about about it here, with a few excursions:
https://returningcenter.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/centering-a-town-7th-effort-on-the-grid/
And reference a piece in Archinect, some time ago.
My post was a bit harsh, but let's be real - any town within 30-40 minutes of a city center is a suburb. It may have at one point been it's own independent town, but since the rise of the car it's been absorbed into a metropolitan area. Reinventing/revitalizing/ re-whatever the suburbs is not a design problem (at least not an interesting one). I think Koolhaas's premise is actually much more interesting. The real opportunity for exploring urbanism is outside of the metropolitan area.
Fair enough. My response was also dismissive (though I'm doubling down on crime and schools being essentially 0% of our motivations for moving where we did).
I disagree that reinventing the 'burbs is not a design problem. It's not *only* a design problem, there's a lot of policy at work too. I think you touch on an interesting point that I'd take one step farther: The introduction of the personal car changed the landscape in a way that the removal of the personal car won't undo. The status quo is unsustainable, but the built environment makes even desirable departures from the status quo all but impossible. Part of this is political, but part of it is also physical. A set of solutions, then, would be a combination of policy and design.
Why do you think the "real opportunity" is outside metro areas?
Gary: thanks for posting that! I hope to look at it more closely when I have the time. I love St. Johns.
Why do you think the "real opportunity" is outside metro areas? Mostly because the suburban condition cannot be remedied through design. Infrastructure has already determined its form. It's impossible to change its infrastructure, so all you can do is influence the perceived success or failure of its existing form - adding a mixed use building here or adding a transit lane there cannot remedy a flawed 50-year old right-of-way or land use plan. And as you note these are largely policy decisions, not design decisions. The opportunity lies outside of metro areas because the infrastructure, both physical and economic, is still flexible. Rural communities are also of a scale where design (and policy for that matter) can still have significant influence on urban form. Much less so in a metro area.
"It's impossible to change its infrastructure" Hard disagree there.
"adding a mixed use building here or adding a transit lane there cannot remedy a flawed 50-year old right-of-way or land use plan." This is small scale thinking. I *am* thinking infrastructurally. Perhaps we disagree over whether or not infrastructure is "design"
Your last sentence seems to inadvertently advocate for more sprawl, which I just can't get behind.
Infrastructure can be designed. What are you proposing? Not advocating for sprawl - just saying it's already happened and there's nothing you can do about it.
I would actually posit that creating sustainable urbanism within a rural context holds far more potential to limit climate change than the suburbanism of a metropolitan region.
My brain is mush today so I'm going to maybe come back to this later when I'm feeling a bit more together...
https://twitter.com/sevensixfive/status/1230494019177865218
Spot on. Unfortunately Koolhaas is still speaking to an audience of developers and academic architects. He's not saying anything new to other professions and experts but I suppose its fairly fresh to his constituency - despite his reputation as a thinker across disciplines.
Knowledge arbitrage is a profitable venture. Knowing what your audience knows (or doesn't know) is key.
Koolhaas got the idea for the exhibition "while visiting a brothel on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada," where he was being toured around the Nevada desert by Lance Gilman, a real estate developer who recently pivoted away from adult entertainment and toward massive, anonymous technology distribution warehouses.
Of course Koolhaas is intrigued.
Ii grew up in one of the swathes he is looking at. My childhood was a mix of wonderful farm houses and the shittiness and horror that only a small town can offer.
The questions he is asking are important. True, there are some weird things in the delivery, but Rem is not ignorant and has not missed the research in other fields. That is a straw-man argument.
I watched the local slaughtering plant, which was already large when I was young turn into a structure so large that it has regional effects today. It is where some of my family works, and it is an economic savior for many people that I care about. But it's seriously huge and inhuman.
The thing is, my family, who are still all farmers, more or less, live a particular lifestyle that is half in one world and half in another, and I think it is painful for them to see a future where the new world will crush the old. Where industrial farming and all of the nastiness that goes with it will remove all of the joy of the family farm. I see them fighting for the vestiges of that life already and the odds are against them. This is something worth thinking about.
On the other hand, here in Japan farms never really went the industrial route. Many of my friends farm on the farming holidays and do their regular job the rest of the year. They grow enough rice for their family and friends and sometimes have a little left over to sell. This is a nice thing. The problem is the farmers who live further out from the cities. Who really live full-time as farmers. They are aging, and their children are not staying on the farms, so those farms are being abandoned, and as a side-effect the mountains that define Japan's hinterland are no longer being cared for either. So we have overgrown forests and all the dangers that implies as well as an emptying rural world. Who is growing Japan's food? This is a national policy problem and one filled with fear.
I don't have any good ideas for North America, but in Japan we (my office as well as profs at Keio university) are looking at ways to bring food production back to the city center (since it never really left Tokyo entirely). We can grow a lot, not grains of course, and not animals, but the rest is possible. As we rethink the future with climate change it seems a no-brainer, and in Japan the farmers are no longer farming, so we need to do something.
What is happening in the rest of the world I have only a small sense of, but if my direct experience in 2 countries is anything to go by, then it is time for architects and planners to think about this stuff. Seriously.
So, anyone who has actually been to this shindig have an opinion?
this review came through my mailbox this afternoon. Rem's apaprent care to not offend china is worrying and weird.
The rest suggests he has no conclusions. This seems likely, and probably a feature by design. His venice biennale was similarly a collection of thoughts and observations without conclusions. For myself I like this approach. but it must be annoying for those who are looking for more. It seems quite like the ode to engineering that phillip Johnson did at the moma in his early career. the conclusion is the presentation itself.
Here, I suspect, as elsewhere, Koolhaas maps trends as if inevitable and doesn't make critical comment or explore alternatives. Fournier looks to be a historical artifact in the exhibition. His neutrality feeds the status quo—and can shape some interesting architecture.
It will take more than architects and planners. We need a shift in public and personal perception to give them something to work with and a responsive government that can put changes into effect. As it stands now, the US government is impotent to deal with climate change or other challenges. It concedes the forces of bigness and investment. I'm not saying this is easy or I have answers.
Thanks for the personal inspection, above. The most important architecture in our lives is the architecture around us. I'd like to see more explore it.
Leave it to Rem and his underlings to take something thats been happening for ever and ever and make it into a BS theoretical construct.
Leave it to architects to lap it all up.
Thanks, tduds. St. Johns has tremendous potential in terms of layout and population, yet it isn't being used. I can only wonder why. We are diminished by the logic of large scale economic forces and chain store reductions—and the chain stores aren't attracted to St. Johns because they don't see sufficient profit. Instead of saying gee whiz and wow at these changes (Koolhaus), we need to come up with alternatives.
Large global private equity investors including Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, GlobalLand and others have spent more than $6.3 billion acquiring nearly 29,000 units in the Portland area in just the past four years.
Developers are demolishing sound, habitable, affordable housing and replacing it with housing priced at the very top of the market. The result is to push low- and moderate-income families and communities of color out to the edges of the metro area, away from jobs, schools, public events, parks, mass transit and walkable neighborhoods.
In many cities, investment firms now own enough property to wield the monopoly power to jack up rents, and–with deep pockets and tax breaks–can weather high vacancy rates in order to keep rents high. Wall Street is using those rent payments to create highly profitable new financial assets called rent-backed securities, much like the shaky mortgage-backed securities behind the financial crisis of 2008.
From Mary King, “Wall Street speculators and the loss of affordable housing.”
And this is only one part of the housing puzzle. Disposable income is diminished for so many by housing and other costs. This has to take a toll. But I'd argue we are attenuated by the cultural dispersion of the media and internet noise, whose effects we see in elections. Something has to bring us together, face to face, where we live. We need a shift in the culture. This is a challenge, but it will take more than planners and architects to come up with solutions.
And I'll add an architectural note. A construction can help shape the identity of an area. The St. Johns Bridge has great influence. People get married beneath it, play there, have concerts there, and you'll see pictures and references to it all over the neighborhood. I'd like to see a building distinctive enough that might complement it and do the same. The site itself is in a location that has practical and symbolic importance.
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