Koolhaas. Countryside, A Report

The rural, remote, and wild territories we call “countryside”, or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities , make up the front line where today’s most powerful forces—climate and ecological devastation, migration, tech, demographic lurches—are playing out. Increasingly under a ‘Cartesian’ regime—gridded, mechanized, and optimized for maximal production—these sites are changing beyond recognition. In his latest publication,** Rem Koolhaas explores the rapid and often hidden transformations underway across the Earth’s vast non-urban areas.**

Countryside, A Report gathers travelogue essays exploring territories marked by global forces and experimentation at the edge of our consciousness: a test site nearFukushima, where the robots that will maintain Japan’s infrastructure and agriculture are tested; a greenhouse city inthe Netherlandsthat may be the origin for the cosmology of today’s countryside; the rapidly thawing permafrost ofCentral Siberia, a region wrestling with the possibility of relocation; refugees populating dying villages in theGermancountryside and intersecting with climate change activists; habituated mountain gorillas confronting humans on ‘their’ territory inUganda; theAmerican Midwest, where industrial-scale farming operations are coming to grips with regenerative agriculture; andChinese villagestransformed into all-in-one factory, e-commerce stores, and fulfillment centers.

This book isthe official companion to the Guggenheim Museum exhibition Countryside, The Future. The exhibition and book mark a new area of investigation for architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas, who launched his career with two city-centric entities:* The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (1975) and Delirious New York *(1978). It’s designed byIrma Boom, who drew inspiration for the book’s pocket-sized concept, as well as its innovative typography and layout, from her research in the Vatican library.

The book brings together collaborative research byAMO,Koolhaas, and students at theHarvard Graduate School of Design; theCentral Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing;Wageningen University in the Netherlands; and theUniversity of Nairobi. Contributors also includeSamir Bantal, Janna Bystrykh, Troy Conrad Therrien, Lenora Ditzler, Clemens Driessen, Alexandra Kharitonova, Keigo Kobayashi, Niklas Maak, Etta Madete, Federico Martelli, Ingo Niermann, Dr. Linda Nkatha Gichuyia, Kayoko Ota, Stephan Petermann, andAnne M. Schneider .