The architecture world has been abuzz lately over the recent public opening of Countryside, The Future, the new exhibition taking place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). 

Let's take a look at some of the photography from the blockbuster exhibition. 

The exhibition is co-organized by OMA co-founder Rem Koolhaas, OMA's research arm AMO and its director Samir Bantal, Guggenheim Museum Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives Troy Conrad Therrien, and a vast team of researchers and interns hailing from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China, Wageningen University in Holland, and the University of Nairobi in Kenya. 

The exhibition proposes a view of the built environment taken at the planetary scale, and investigates the "radical changes in the [...] 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities."  

This global perspective is met with a grab bag of exhibition materials that includes large-format prints of aerial photography, dioramas of various types, a working John Deere tractor, an artificial greenhouse installation, and roving display objects. Additionally, the museum's atrium walls, solid balcony railings, and gallery ceilings are accented with lines of text and large titles. 

Exhibition text explaining the wide focus of the exhibition reads: "A central thesis of the exhibition is that our current form of urban life has necessitated the organization, abstraction, and automation of the countryside at an unprecedented scale. Data storage, fulfillment centers, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, robotic automation, economic innovation, worker migration, and the private purchase of land for ecological preservation are in many cases more actively explored and experimented with in the countryside than the city."

So far, the exhibition has been received with more than a pinch of salt due to the broad scope of its focus. It has also been seen by some as an attempt to eclipse the work of established parallel fields, like landscape architecture, geography, and anthropology. Even within the architecture community, there has been push-back. Justin Davidson, architecture critic of New York Magazine, for example, took a skeptical eye toward the exhibition in a recent review, writing, "This is what you might get if you asked a celebrated European philosopher-architect to reinvent the Iowa State Fair." Either way, the sprawling exhibition—and its pocket-sized exhibition catalogue—is significant for its prominent take-over of the Guggenheim Museum and its iconic, storied atrium galleries. 

If you can't make it to New York City to experience it all in person, check out the audio companion produced for the exhibition by the museum. The 18-track recording is led by curators Troy Conrad Therrien and Ashley Mendelsohn and includes contributions from Koolhaas, Bantal, and other collaborators.

Koolhaas, Bantal, Therrien and other exhibition curators will present the exhibition in a conversation taking place on March 13. The exhibition will be on view through August 14, 2020.