The thin man flies by unnoticed to a group of Vernissage guests who stand in front of the bulbous entrance of the Guggenheim Museum. The dark-shaded views – Rem Koolhaas' brand, aims to the front, somewhere in the street canyons of Manhattan, the architect has once so suggestive in his Manifesto "Delirious New York" summoned. Awesome Waiting to see him, "that's the man," whispers to a bearded with glasses.

Quickly the figure disappears behind the giant tractor with man-high wheels, the front of the Museum, located on Fifth Avenue, and the exhibition is "Countryside, the Future" in order to draw attention.

For the past ten years, the Dutchman, and his think tank AMO and generations of collecting student data to monitor the condition of those places in the world, which represent 98 percent of the surface area, however, so far little attention is paid to the so – called country have been. Koolhaas, whose own publications were about cities, urban trend-setter, wants to throw around with the tour de force of this exhibition, the rudder, the attention flows from the city directing the tug to be much too little conscious rural downside and into the light of the Public.

Here, in Frank Lloyd Wright's wondrous Spiralbau of the Guggenheim Museum, began a little less than a half-century of Koolhaas’ career, as he dreams, introduced in 1978, its New York. The book "Delirious New York", a Manifesto and at the same time, a love letter to the city in the 1970s, made the young Dutch journalist, writer and architect, almost famous overnight. The exhibition "The Sparkling Metropolis" accompanied the book with drawings of real and imaginary views of the city, the author Rem Koolhaas and his colleagues from the then newly-founded Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), including Madelon Vriesendorp and Zaha Hadid were.

This has little to do with nature or the grown structures

And now, Koolhaas sets in the same place, a final sign of his career as a Prophet of sparkling cities, and sings the song of the country. It is not without a certain irony that, of all things Frank Lloyd Wright, the Builder of the Guggenheim, a well-known hater of cities. You could get the idea that here, Wright's nature-worshipping spirit earn a late victory over Koolhaas’ enthusiasm for artificial structures.

not Yet so it. Because the image of the country, the exhibition has little to do with nature or the grown structures. The deeper you dig into the thicket of accumulated facts, the clearer the image of the alienated way of dealing with what we call the country. There, where the city-dwellers, don't look, and while browsing in their "love of country"booklet and the infantile Dream of close-to-nature Idyll, a moment, the future is already here. And it is sometimes shocking – the rural areas of this world in a loveless, concept-free back rooms, from which the needs of the greedy cities operated and organized.

Stalin followed a visit to the interior of a car

The "Countryside" appears as an endlessly vast universe of sparsely manned plant and animal breeding plants, from blink data centers, digital giants, lonely in front of rattling machine factories and huge package distribution centers. Everywhere and gigantic industrial plants, through Codes and Algorithms designed for robotic operation optimized. They obey a very own, human perception of strangers Aesthetics, kilometre-long coordinate systems in the glow from the flickering LED light. Whether farms or Wilderness, oceans or villages, not everything urban is clamped in this modern supply system, the Kalahari, the Great Barrier Reef and also the Nevada high desert – are the Gigafabriken of Tesla.

It is an overwhelming data and knowledge quantity, which Koolhaas and his army have worn by comrades-in-arms here. The long-awaited exhibition – Koolhaas has also held in Switzerland several times, including lectures – with its text-heavy berths and numbers, despite the ends of the Assembly a bit like an old Soviet world exhibition pavilion. Along the spiral-like upward wind exhibition ramp of the Guggenheim ends of the building will pass all reeled off in a hurry, ideas and epochs, lawn, figures such as the German architect Herman Sörgel in diving, the inventor of Atlantropa, an imaginary composite of Africa and Europe, for you would have of the Mediterranean sea by 100 meters lower.

Stalin followed the visitors on a small cart (a child of curatorial incidence), and the megalomaniac plans of other dictators to redesign the landscape carefully. He even tried to change the course of Soviet rivers to reverse – and failed. Libya's Gaddafi to put an artificial river through the Sahara – the Work was interrupted when he was executed. China joins the world with a huge network of ports, motorways and railway lines – too bad that all the African Nations be suppressed as a result of it.

In the Qatari desert, flown in genes of cows Mozzarella

spooky produce way fits the real existing Dutch system Koppert Cress quite well to these megalomaniacal plans. In huge halls, where young plants can be pulled up only so far until you develop under pink light taste, and then as micro greens in the Restaurants can be sold. And also the stables in the desert of Qatar fits, in the middle of the sandy Nowhere, where the largest plant in the world, the flown-in 4000 cows Mozzarella for Export produce.

It is noticeable: Koolhaas' "country" is a clean, brightly lit place – a little cruel, but efficient. Poorly paid migrant fruit pickers, or starving African shepherd is not in this universe. The cows in Qatar, toiling dutifully in their boxes. Chinese farmers commute from the vertical housing silos into horizontal farm equipment.

Koolhaas, belongs to a still believers in progress with Generation, writes the future in the title of his exhibition seriously. He wants to believe in the healing power of knowledge and can hide his admiration for the post-human architecture hardly. "Fantastic, beautiful", be it from machine to machine-built structures, he said in an interview, he says of the "stunning banality," to even "the new Sublime", in this pink and green shimmering greenhouses and data centers to places.

Suitable to this spiritual enthusiasm, asks at the Guggenheim at the end of a wall inscription: "May be combined in the present-day extreme Know-how with quality?" The Exhibition organizers hope obviously be a Yes. The visitor looks at the remote-controlled tractor, monster at the door – and hesitates.

"Countryside, the Future", the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. To 14. 8.

note:
This article was first published on 8. In March, the international women's day. On this occasion, we use – wherever possible – instead of the generic Maskulinums the generic feminine. For example: patients, instead of patients.

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Created: 07.03.2020, 17:34 PM