Countryside: Future of the World

Opens February 20, 2020 and closes Summer 2020

According to architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas, the fact that 50 percent of the global population now lives in cities has become an excuse to ignore the other 98 percent of the world’s surface: the countryside. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has invited Koolhaas and AMO, the think tank of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), to collaborate on a project that explores the radical changes occurring in the countryside, extending work underway by AMO / Koolhaas and students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

On view through the summer of 2020, the rotunda exhibition Countryside: Future of the World (working title) will present speculations about tomorrow through insights into the countryside today. More than any city, the vast nonurban territories of the countryside have become the frontier of transformation. The exhibition will explore artificial intelligence and automation, the effects of genetic experimentation, political radicalization, mass and micro migration, large-scale territorial management, human-animal ecosystems, subsidies and tax incentives, the impact of the digital on the physical world, and other developments that are altering landscapes across the globe.

Countryside: Future of the World is organized by Troy Conrad Therrien, Curator, Architecture and Digital Initiatives, with Ashley Mendelsohn, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Digital Initiatives.

The Leadership Committee for Countryside: Future of the World, chaired by Dasha Zhukova, is gratefully acknowledged for its support with special thanks to the Blavatnik Family Foundation.