Today’s major changes are taking place in the countryside, says Koolhaas. His exhibition Countryside: The Future is overwhelming, but de Volkskrant nevertheless distilled a number of main lines.
It is well known that they built imposing cities and temples in Central America, but did you know that the Maya were also ingenious farmers? Instead of seeding fields ‘efficiently’ with one species, they planted a mix of crops that complemented each other in terms of nutritional needs and insect attraction. In this way the soil remained fertile, they prevented insect pests and they reap rich harvests.
In search of environmentally friendly ways to produce food, researchers at Wageningen University have developed a 21st-century variant of the Maya method: pixel farming. It is one of about twenty research projects that architect Rem Koolhaas and his think tank AMO have brought together in the eclectic exhibition Countryside: The Future, which opened February 20 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Pixel farmers use computer models to determine the optimal combination of plant species, which are sown on pieces of soil measuring 50 by 50 centimeters. The unexpectedly romantic end result of this approach can be seen in the museum: a life-size photograph of a landscape with grains and poppies, which seems to have fallen straight out of a Van Gogh.
‘ignored’ for a long time
Countryside: The Future is a global, multidisciplinary exploration of what Koolhaas describes as the ignored realm; so the countryside. It is partly his fault that it has been ‘ignored’ for a long time. After all, it was he who set his sights on the metropolis in 1978 with his book Delirious New York – a retro-active manifesto for Manhattan, with which he broke through internationally. Until then, no one saw the quality of chaotic Manhattan, now it was suddenly called a Sparkling Metropolis, after the exhibition that was shown on the top floor of the Guggenheim the same year. It was an installation with drawings and paintings by Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe and Elia Zenghelis, former partners and co-founders of Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).
Meanwhile, OMA’s spectacular buildings are rising all over the world, from the Chinese State Television office in Beijing to the library of Qatar. But when the United Nations reported in 2007 that half of the world’s population now lived in cities, and researchers flocked to cities, Koolhaas decided to shift his focus to ‘the 98 percent of the world that is not a city’. Where the other half of the people live and where – to take the Netherlands as an example – the nitrogen crisis, earthquakes as a result of gas extraction and the dulling of the landscape take place. Approaching him for a new partnership five years ago, the Guggenheim was enthusiastic and put the entire spiral building designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright at its disposal.
Koolhaas’ thesis: the major changes – positive and negative – are currently taking place in the countryside. For this exhibition he looked for ‘proof of progress’ in the countryside.
Ambitious or naive?
Is it ambitious or naive to make an exhibition about the future of roughly the entire world? First of all, let’s note that Koolhaas is not alone in dealing with the countryside. The Universities of Nairobi and Wageningen (which recently presented a map of ‘green’ the Netherlands in 2120), companies such as Volkswagen and the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, Russia, have been researching the countryside and climate change for years. AMO sought collaboration with them for this exhibition and in this way gained access to files and special locations, such as a gorilla area in Uganda.
At the entrance of the exhibition is a mega tractor, inside robots drive around that are supposed to represent Stalin and a shepherd from the time of the Romans. A thick column is plastered with magazine covers and toy packaging showing clichés about the countryside and the city; the nostalgic Little house on the prairiefeeling versus the futuristic world of Lara Croft. The floor of the ground floor is stickered with contemporary elements from agriculture. The introduction is a wall on which Koolhaas asks a thousand questions about the countryside. And then the exhibition has yet to begin.
This ‘interesting mess’, as a British journalist described the exhibition, says something about Koolhaas’s comprehensive approach to themes. The countryside is not served in bite-sized chunks, there is no conclusion; the visitors have to get to work. To absorb all the cards, photos, films and texts, you need at least half a day, if your head doesn’t explode prematurely. “We hope people come back,” says curator Troy Conrad Therrien. What stays with you after your first visit are these fragments.
1. The real life
The Romans and Chinese developed a similar philosophy about the countryside over two centuries ago: they saw it as the place where you came to life. In the city you were working, outside there was time and space to relax, meet friends and develop yourself culturally. The Chinese called it xiaoyao, the Romans otium; the opposite of negotium, or trading. Mindfulness, retreats in converted monasteries and spas are contemporary variants to escape the city and return to pre-capitalist existence, focused on nature. The paradox of leisure, as otium is called today, is that it is part of the same consumer society; the countryside is sold as a medicine against burnout, tourism as a rescue for empty villages.
2. Otherworldly
In the section about political redesign AMO shows Grand Plans political leaders made for the countryside over the past two centuries, including those of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Communist China wanted to make the Great Leap Forward to an industrial society through the transformation of the agrarian economy. Stalin reformed 1.2 million square kilometers of nature to increase food production. The Nazis idealized the countryside; Hitler built highways to open up the countryside and to make the beauty of the landscape experienceable.
The images give an uneasy feeling, especially when you read what curator Troy Conrad Therrien writes about these ‘master countrysiders’ in the publication accompanying the exhibition. ‘They specialized in bloodshed and genocide, but their politics was also capable of reforming the countryside.’ He makes a link with the current climate crisis and ‘shining cities on democratic hills’ that ‘pretend things are not so bad and pretend powerlessness in the face of the horrors of ecocide’. Is Koolhaas trying to say that we should look beyond the horrors and learn something from the dictators? It comes across as otherworldly.
3. Rebirth
The proof of progress in the countryside that Koolhaas was looking for, he found partly in ‘experiments’: villages where new forms of activity arise in unexpected ways. In 1998, for example, a boat with Kurdish refugees ran aground in Riace, Italy, a deserted place where only 250 elderly people lived. With subsidies, the refugees were able to renovate abandoned houses and learn a trade. Suddenly there were children playing in the village square again, the café reopened and a sewing workshop opened. The rebirth of Riace inspired other villages to take a similar approach. Best photo: four young African men carry the Jesus statue from the church of Camini; a ritual that had not been practiced for years because the ancient inhabitants did not have the strength for it.
4. Sinking Ground
The doom of climate change hangs above the exhibition. This is often spoken of as something that will happen in the future, that we can still prevent if we reduce the CO2achieve objectives. You lose hopes when you see the thawing Permafrost in the far north of Siberia, where huge amounts of methane – stored in the frozen ground – are released, warming the atmosphere and speeding up the thawing process. Entire forests and lakes are ‘sucked away’ in gigantic craters. What about the 4 million people who live here? The geopolitics surrounding the Arctic mainly focuses on economic ‘opportunities’ arising from warming; a possible new sea connection, mining even more fossil fuels.
5. Think small
Can new technology bring salvation? Can we provide food for the world’s population in an environmentally friendly way with high-tech greenhouses, machines that photograph plants to optimize photosynthesis, and fish farms where ‘free-range’ fish are monitored with facial scans to get sick individuals from the basins? The images are not cheerful. But then there is the photo of the ‘wild’ field flowers in Wageningen; could this be the countryside where we will settle in the future? Pixel farming is a promise, but there is still a problem: how are you going to harvest the mix of crops? The researchers argue that we should stop thinking in mega-greenhouses, stables and tractors and embrace the scale of the pixel. Next to the photo is a Wall-E-like robot, programmed to pick plants.
Countryside: The Future, t/m 14/8, Guggenheim Museum, New York
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Varying reactions
Countryside, The Future has been received mixedly by the international press. Edwin Heathcote of the British Financial Times writes that ‘Koolhaas’ claim that no one looks at the countryside does not stand, but he does ‘shatter (existing) ideas in a shocking clash of politics, technology, maps and new forms of colonization’. Brad Balfour from Irish Examiner USA thinks it’s fantastic that the Guggenheim is making its building available for ‘something useful’, i.e. attention to the climate crisis, which President Trump denies. Justin Davidson from New York Magazine instead speaks of “an enormous waste — of attention, exhibition space, resources, talent and expertise.” Davidson: ‘[…] at some point someone should have put him on a chair and asked what the point of the whole exhibition is. The answer, it turns out; there isn’t.’
The British Caroline Roux of The Art Newspaper sees Countryside as Koolhaas’ “next step in his ongoing mission to stay relevant.” Roux: ‘He started out as a journalist, made a name for himself with a book and only became a practicing architect when he was embraced as a bona fide prophet. Now he joins and doesn’t join at the same time the next big thing. While climate change and environmental issues dominate the debate, Koolhaas seems to have invented his own version.’
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