The famed advocate of urban living embraces country life with a new exhibition.
Forty or so years ago, before he was a "starchitect"—before anyone called them starchitects—Rem Koolhaas made his mark as a theorist of the city. His 1978 book, Delirious New York, pointed out a fundamental irony of Manhattan: that its rational, officially imposed grid of streets and stacked cubes of apartments allowed, enabled, and even generated the teeming, unruly chaos of urban life that takes place inside its orderly framework.
With AMO, the research and branding side of his firm, OMA, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has designed numerous exhibitions throughout his prominent career.
Illustration by Sam Kerr
This wild, polemical celebration of New York, which he called a "retroactive manifesto for Manhattan," positioned the metropolis as the defining spatial archetype of the 20th century, and for decades it has influenced debates about cities everywhere.
The exhibit Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Photo by Nathan Keay, courtesy MCA Chicago
Koolhaas went on to shape many of them. His firm, OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), has excelled at designing buildings that are era-marking symbols in cities around the world—Seattle’s diagonally gridded Central Library in 2004; De Rotterdam, a trio of conjoined towers in the Dutch firm’s hometown in 2013; the monumental public spaces of Qatar National Library in 2017, to name just a few out of dozens.
One section of his upcoming exhibition, Countryside, The Future, will focus on "new nature," or how humans have optimized and automated biological processes. Koppert Cress, a Dutch company that farms aromatic plants, will be featured in the show. "What started as an almost eccentric effort to look away from cities now has more relevance and urgency because of discussions about climate change and new technology."
Photo by Pieternel Van Velden
See the full story on Dwell.com: Q&A: Urbanist Rem Koolhaas Turns Our Attention to the Countryside
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