NEW YORK, NY.- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas, and AMO, the think tank of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), will collaborate on a project exploring radical changes in the countryside, the vast nonurban areas of Earth. The project extends work already underway by AMO, Koolhaas, and students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and will culminate in a rotunda exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in fall 2019.

Organized by Guggenheim Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives Troy Conrad Therrien, Countryside: Future of the World (working title) will present speculations about tomorrow through insights into the countryside of today. 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.

“The Guggenheim has an appetite for experimentation and a founding belief in the transformative potential of art and architecture,” said Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. “We are excited to reengage with Rem Koolhaas, one of today’s foremost thinkers and architectural forecasters, and to embark together with a global team of researchers on an intellectual journey that will return the countryside to the cultural radar and yield urgent insights into the ways humans continue to shape and be shaped by the world around us.”

Following decades of urban triumphalism, in which much of architectural production and thinking has focused on development and audiences in metropolitan areas, Countryside: Future of the World posits that rural territories are undergoing more radical reorganizations. The exhibition will explore this frontier, which has largely remained unexamined by city-focused architects.

“The fact that more than 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in cities has become an excuse to ignore the countryside,” said Koolhaas. “I have long been fascinated by the transformation of the city, but since looking at the countryside more closely in recent years, I have been surprised by the intensity of change taking place there. The story of this transformation is largely untold, and it is particularly meaningful to present it in one of the world’s great museums in one of the world’s densest cities.”