Welcome to “Countryside, the Future”: This is what you might get if you asked a celebrated European philosopher-architect to reinvent the Iowa State Fair. No mess, no smells, just acres of color printouts, cryptic homilies about nature, and a couple of pesticide-spraying drones. Did you know that agriculture is increasingly computerized? — New York Magazine
New York Magazine's architecture critic, Justin Davidson, takes a no-holds-barred look at the Countryside, The Future exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The exhibition, developed by a research and exhibition team led by OMA/AMO and Rem Koolhaas, explores "radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories [...] or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities."
Regarding the exhibition, Davidson writes, "Given that the countryside is a site of radical reinvention, how is it possible that there are, as one wall text suggests, virtually no books about it? That’s a profound mystery, or would be if you ignored the tens of thousands of volumes published in recent years about, say, wilderness, farming, fishing, nature, the environment, small towns, communes, rural populism, folk cultures, indigenous peoples, land management, wildlife management, hunting, water, winemaking, and deserts … not to mention suburbs."
one of my students just came back from seeing the show. Said student loved it. Met Rem. Made the student think. That is not a small thing.
Architects are not thinking about this yet. They should. Whether Rem has the wrong end of the stick or not I will leave to the eggheads who want to hit Rem's egg-y head. Still, if more of our future and current architects are looking beyond all the bullshit about style (as if what buildings looked like was the only important thing architects do in this world)....the better.
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Yes, this show looks bad. What is a clever and important premise turns into another debacle of flying over Lagos and fetishizing the slums. This review makes all the good points, but isn’t smart enough to be constructive and lament what could have been. Most importantly, where is the Rem of 2000, the one who gave us IIT, SPL, SMLXL even CCTV (the seeds of his and many others demise). The spirit of hyperhumanism there is lost on nonsensical ideas like (post-humanism, not a real thing).
You can’t just apply the same old methods on every topic. The country requires a different process, one that is connected to the city but not the same thing. Would have been better if it had thought harder about challenging its own premises and logic.
In short, Rem asks the right questions but has the wrong answers (or wrong observations). Rewind to history before 1970, when architects made their name in the country before working in the city. Now you have “Urbanist architects/critic” doing towers and housing that all looks the same while the country (mostly superior work) is mostly ignored. The avant-garde is still in the country, but the cities are stale and corrupt. The critics can’t say much because they don’t even ask the question at all and laugh at architects that do.
I give Rem a C+ here and the critics/media an F-.
I'd argue it's not the job of the critic to lament what could have been, but simply to evaluate what is. That said - I agree with you that I'd like to see some kind of constructive counterpoint to the seemingly missed "point" of Countryside.
so you went to see the exhibition then chemex? What did the reviewers miss that you picked up?
Is this like the “you didn’t read the article” reply? Most of it has been published directly on social media (if you follow the right people) with content summaries (REMs shows are more about content than experience anyway). Have had work lifted by OMA interns before so I get the process.
As I said, it’s a good topic. But OMA has openly admired to being a media entity post 2008 so an architecture analysis is beside the point. Postmodernism and Venturism, which Rem worships, is all about the idea not substance anyway, so why would anyone need to see the pictures pasted on the wall in person anyway?
And, as I said, it’s not that the critics missed anything here (they have summarized and criticized) but failed to see the larger context — why does the NY elite need to wait for Rem to come down from up high to care about the people and buildings outside of NY and LA? Urbanism has become such a religion that it takes a high priest to direct the sheep
Now showing at the Guggenheim: Branding IS Substance, starring Rem Koolhaus.
Coming soon: Paintings by Sylvester Stallone and George W. Bush.
This is what you might get if you asked a celebrated European philosopher-architect to reinvent the Iowa State Fair.
From Davidson's piece. What exactly is Koolhaus's background in philosophy and other cultural studies? I don't know the answer, but my sense is he makes these things up on the fly.
Koolhaas—and I've read a couple of his books.
They really ought to have this on in the background
Would be interesting to know whether any of the commentators have actually visited the exhibit prior to sharing their views. Some of the commentary indicates a general lack of knowledge about the architect, as the internationally known architect's name is improperly spelled. If one doesn't know the answer to "What exactly is Koolhaus's (sic) background in philosophy and other cultural studies?", perhaps a brief background search wouldn't be asking too much.
As if visiting this shallow, pretentious display would change my opinion of it or of Rem. You couldn't pay me enough to see this 'exhibit'. I’d rather tour a waste treatment facility, which would in fact would be more culturally pertinent.
His purported image as a polymath thinker makes the exhibition all the worse. It is an uncritical, unoriginal hodge podge of statistics and facts gathered by students from publicly available sources. OMA/AMO derives no conclusion from all the glut of data - the exhibition just screams "Look at all the stats I've collected! Look at them!". Its a term paper that simply states its sources and makes no attempt at analysis.
Koolhaas is speaking to an audience of architecture students and a few commercial clients who want to see the maestro flexing his intellectual muscle. He isn't speaking to economists, planners, farmers, and all whose work the exhibition helpfully neglects to mention in its glib comparison of literature published on the so-called countryside versus the city.
Rem's world has always been manicured, much like the academic world that he inhabits. Real people don't behave.
one of my students just came back from seeing the show. Said student loved it. Met Rem. Made the student think. That is not a small thing.
Architects are not thinking about this yet. They should. Whether Rem has the wrong end of the stick or not I will leave to the eggheads who want to hit Rem's egg-y head. Still, if more of our future and current architects are looking beyond all the bullshit about style (as if what buildings looked like was the only important thing architects do in this world)....the better.
Ignoring the complete disconnect between the message and the body of work ...
koolhaas has never really justified his architecture with his research projects. They are separate things. Informative, not prescriptive. Not sure if this is what you are onto? His designs are specific, research is broad and general. Similar approach to both, but he doesn't make the mistake of trying to say one proves the other. That disconnect is a feature, not a flaw. Otherwise people will be running around saying nonsense on the order of "he wrote this and that on page whatever of some text 30 years ago and then built something entirely in contradiction..." and therefore he's a liar...or whatever. Or are you saying the material he is showing in the exhibition doesn't match the message? That could be. I haven't seen it. It isn't a complaint from the most angry critics though. What did you notice that they didn't?
"Made the students think". I respect you Will, but even the most inane Sciarc bullshit makes students think. Rem's current work like this exhibition does not advance the profession, it just advances academia in the most impractical and useless way possible.
it could be. The critique implies there are issues with the entire project. But look, I grew up in a farming community and I think we should be talking about this stuff. When nearly every piece of pork eaten in Japan is being processed in an insanely large processing plant in rural Manitoba it is maybe time to think about what the implications are for our profession. We ignored suburbia, or were never invited to play is perhaps the better description of our role. Maybe this is something we should be thinking about. WHere does our food come from? What if we grew some of it in our cities as part of our response to climate change, and in the process make our cities more livable? What would that look like? What would the countryside look like if it wasnt so industrialized? I wouldn't mind returning to the days when my uncle could afford to run his own farm. That would be a good thing. Just because agriculture is not a mystery to other professions does not mean we are free to ignore it ourselves. For bette r or worse, Rem is making this a subject for our profession. And it is about fucking time. If my students think this is part of their job then all the better. If my clients think this is something to think about then we are way ahead on the road we need to get to. So, whatever flaws this show has, I am glad of the subject matter and glad of the inquiry going on. The criticisms so far feel like old people getting pissed off because queen Elizabeth's coronation was televised more than a serious commentary. In which case, what's the actual problem with this damn show?
Future OMA interns
Fair enough, Will. It would be worth considering what it takes to get attention nowadays. This is one way.
Your comments suggest the value as well as the limitations of the exhibition. It only obtains real value when the subject gets into the hands of the policy makers involved and theorists and experts who have made studies—and who probably couldn't get this kind of attention, at least with the design community. Yet I don't get the sense the exhibition is based on either. I haven't seen it, of course.
Pictures of tractors and lego farm characters, yeah Rem is really addressing the pertinent issues of the day. It’s a smorgasbord of shitty advertising, which upon further reflection (and in reference to my comment above) actually does does connect directly to his work. He has single-jandedly turned the Guggenheim into a bad children's museum. But the biggest embarrassment here is not Koolhaus' moronic project but that the Guggenheim bought into it and is avidly promoting this psuedointellectual bullshit. What's next - an exhibition of Kanye's affordable housing?
Exactly Miles, this exhibition, like many of Rem's other projects and exhibitions have no worth for architecture or socio economis. It is a bullshit, ugly collage for architecture students to lap up and create employment for trust fund babies. It is easy to say that Rem has devolved to this level, but he was perhaps always a Class A bullshitter, with no real substance.
"Architects are not thinking about this yet." Except of course the many thousands of architects located in the country that don't have access to the mainstream media or Guggenheim
It reads as if Justin Davidson has no familiarity at all with Rem Koolhaas's career. There was no mention of any other research projects. No mention of Delirious New York. No mention of AMO.
Without any of that context, how is the average reader supposed to understand why the Guggenheim is having this show? Maybe Justin took Koolhaas's "fuck context" quote to mean that he should not provide the reader with any historical context.
Again, you have to wonder what it takes to get attention now and what means we have at our disposal. Compare with the political scene today. Also you have to decide what Koolhaas is trying to do. I've still only seen a few pictures, but I suspect I could zip through the exhibition in an hour—and the Guggenheim is designed to push the flow. I would leave with jarring images, confusion, and a few graphics I wouldn't have bothered to decipher but which made me aware of this vast area many of us don't think about. It poses a situation and asks questions. That is something.
He gives us many sentimental pictures of the west, which are, in fact, a large part of our experience, or that of many of us. Obviously they aren't a solid base for exploration. If they don't irritate you, the massing of these images calls that sentimentality into question and makes us wonder what the right emotion is, if there is one, what we might replace it with. Such images in this treatment, of course, also enhance his pop status.
At least he doesn't give us some breezy Utopian vision:
BIG's floating ocean city.
And you know Koolhaas won't give us this:
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