Justin Davidson scorches Rem's "Countryside"
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'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."
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