On the evening of Sunday, September 22, I arrived at the Guggenheim to find many of architecture’s leading lights gathered in the theater below the museum’s iconic rotunda. They were there to hear architect Rem Koolhaas speak about his new exhibition Countryside, The Future, opening in February. Attendees included designer Petra Blaisse, Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, Koolhaas’s New York partners Shohei Shigematsu and Jason Long, and the new dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) Sarah Whiting–all friends, alumni, or collaborators in Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).
Organized by Troy Conrad Therrien, the Guggenheim’s curator of architecture, Countryside will be the first exhibition of architectural research ever presented in the rotunda, the museum’s most prestigious venue. Downstairs, the night’s discussion focused on the challenges of the climate crisis, with provocative addresses by Koolhaas and Sigrid Kaag, Foreign Trade Minister of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. “The Roman tradition of the countryside saw it as the most attra…