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 attractive context for the human, where hedonism and intellectualism reigned; could these old concepts become precepts for the future?” Koolhaas asked. “There is pleasure to be found in this urgency.”
The relentlessly beige, circular auditorium lent a liturgical air to the proceedings. The audience, arrayed in low-slung seats set into a sunken, central area not unlike a conversation pit, listened with rapt attention. “Hedonism in the face of global catastrophe?” I wondered. Koolhaas’s gospel mines the present to build compelling scenarios for tomorrow. This alluring brand of creative thinking is like a kind of alchemy that transforms crisis into opportunity. So it wasn’t hard to imagine the audience as a congregation in the church of Koolhaas, or perhaps adherents of a new age design cult whose leader has seen the future. The Kool-Aid arrives in the rotunda on February 20, 2020.