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'Countryside at the United Nations' by Rem Koolhaas + AMO opens in New York

2021-06-16T12:40:00-04:00

AMO, the research, branding, and publication studio of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), has taken over the fences of the United Nations headquarters in New York for a public exhibition that serves as a continuation of Countryside, The Future.

Curated by architect and OMA founder Rem Koolhaas and AMO director Samir Bantal, Countryside was originally presented in February 2020 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition presented research gathered by AMO over five years, bringing together discussions from scientific, sociological, artistic, and political spaces. It set out to define and explore the contemporary “countryside” of the “98% of the Earth’s surface not occupied by cities.” Countryside, The Future was unfortunately shut down just three weeks after its opening due to the coronavirus pandemic but continued after the museum reopened.

Previously on Archinect: See photos from "Countryside, The Future" at the Guggenheim Museum

This new showcase, informed by ...

Countryside: The Future and the Past

2021-01-26T20:48:00-05:00

It is no exaggeration to say that our present is the future that Dorothea Lange’s images foretold. The crisis of agriculture in the face of toxic capitalism and climatic disaster that is at the center of her famous photographs might also have served to focus and sharpen "Countryside: The Future," where it is occasionally a subject but more often merely an unstated subtext.

In "Countryside: The Future and the Past," Deborah Gans reviews Countryside: The Future, at the Guggenheim Museum, the multimedia culmination of years of interdisciplinary, globe-spanning research led by OMA's Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal, director of its think tank, AMO, alongside Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures, curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister at the Museum of Modern Art, the first solo show devoted to the celebrated documentary photographer in more than half a century.

Although the exhibitions are very different in scale, ambition, and emotional tenor, each is propelled by the efforts of vastly different urban artists and professionals to document and comprehend historical transformations in rural life. Together they offer an intriguing counterpoint: one body of work is determined to remain detached; the other is driven by political commitment.

'Countryside, the Future' through the post-pandemic lens

2020-11-06T13:35:00-05:00

Certainly New Yorkers’ revaluation of the countryside had begun long before the “Decameron”-style outflows of remote-working urbanites and their families, fleeing the coronavirus last spring. [...] The phrase “farm to table” has been a cliché for years, and Park Slope idealists long ago exported their Marie Antoinette rural fantasies to the Hudson Valley.

With the coronavirus eating its way through America's hinterlands and the election unmasking a deeply entrenched urban-rural ideological divide, NYT art critic Jason Farago takes a second look at the Rem Koolhaas-starring exhibition Countryside, the Future which opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum back in February — only to close again three weeks later due to the unraveling pandemic.

"What 'Countryside' does is take seriously the contention that all avant-gardism gets commodified, that dissent is always co-opted, and that under such conditions you might want to get out of town," Farago writes.

Related on Archinect: Koolhaas in the countryside

See photos from "Countryside, The Future" at the Guggenheim Museum

2020-02-27T18:46:00-05:00

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.

Installation view of the Guggenheim Museum rotunda. Image by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

The exhibition makes use of the museum's continuous spiral design to display a wide range of materials. Image by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

The Rotunda oculus, filled with large-format information displays. Image by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

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 Schoo...

Justin Davidson scorches Rem's "Countryside"

2020-02-25T14:36:00-05:00

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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Koolhaas in the countryside

2020-02-14T13:21:00-05:00

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 ...

20 excellent films that feature cities as principal characters

2016-08-30T14:58:00-04:00

What would "Lost in Translation" be without Tokyo, or "In Bruges" without, well, Bruges? This engrossing Taste of Cinema piece selects 20 films released from the 1930s up to the cinematic present in which the city and its surrounds play a vital role in the narrative. The piece then delves into the beauty, power, and ambiance of that particular locale as it relates to each film's plot. Unsurprisingly, Jim Jarmusch's work makes a few appearances, as does the original 1997 version of "Insomnia," which qualifies as pretty much the most noir movie ever shot entirely in daylight.

Screenshot from "Insomnia."

Screenshot from "Night on Earth."

Screenshot from "Mystery Train."

As a kind of thesis statement, the piece explains that:

"The films listed rely on the narrative space and its geographical and sociological specifications. The plots of these films are formed by numerous references to the spatial and temporal phase in which the story is taking place."

For more on the intersection of cinema an...

Non-Urbanism by Brett Milligan

2012-06-07T12:44:00-04:00

“If you go into the hardcore urban or the hardcore rural, it is quite simple to define it, but that is not so relevant. It is more significant to talk about the condition in between. And this condition is extremely difficult to define.” – Urban planner Kees Christiaanse in conversation with Bernd Upmeyer and Beatriz Ramo on behalf of MONU Magazine

MONU’s call for submissions for its latest issue (#16, Non Urbanism) asked its participants to “investigate how non-urbanism may be defined and identified today, and how non-urban areas interact with and relate to urban areas.“ Fortunately for readers, the printed compendium seems to succeed in largely refuting the very existence of its themed subject matter. Or, if it doesn’t go so far as to refute the ‘non urban’, the content demonstrates how difficult it is to call out any place as not being deeply under the influence of it.

MONU #16’s agenda fits within mounting reactions to the geographic myopia found in some of the contemporary ‘urban age’ rhetoric. ‘Non Urbanism’ explores what happens when the inventory of urban moves beyond widget counts of human bodies for its reductive definition. It asks: what is non-urbanism when we approach the ‘built environment’ in a fully relational way? What happens when we see cities in the wider geographic field of their effects, borrowin...