Felicity D. Scott

  • View of “Countryside, The Future,” 2020, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: Stephen Bailey.
    print July/August 2020

    FUTURES MARKET

    “COUNTRYSIDE, THE FUTURE” opened at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on February 20, 2020. On March 13, the show prematurely closed, joining the ranks of exhibitions and public events interrupted by the spread of Covid-19. Organized by Rem Koolhaas, Troy Conrad Therrien, Samir Bantal, and an army of collaborators, the expansive exhibition is dedicated to the “radical changes” ostensibly taking place in “rural, remote, and wild territories . . . or the 98% of the Earth’s surface not occupied by cities.” Framed as a corrective to architects’ enduring habit of privileging the urban, the show

  • previews January 2020

    “Countryside, The Future”

    Curated by Rem Koolhaas and Troy Conrad Therrien

    Following his 2014 Venice Biennale project and its stocktaking of architecture’s “global” condition, Koolhaas, with a host of collaborators, takes on another “mutant form of human coexistence”: the countryside. Eighty case studies of the rapid transformation of rural environments across the planet—ambiguously described in press materials as “non-urban”—will appear in the form of films, documents, and paintings, speaking not of our tired romance with bucolic landscapes but of artificial intelligence, automation, genetic engineering, tax incentives,

  • Jef Raskin with an installation of his “Bloxes,” University of California, San Diego, 1969. From “Everything Loose Will Land.” Photo: David Wing.
    previews May 2013

    “Everything Loose Will Land”

    What brings together Alison Knowles’s House of Dust, 1971; Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s 1971–72 Womanhouse; Jef Raskin’s cardboard “Bloxes”; the Studio Watts Workshop; Bernard Tschumi’s “Sanctuaries” essay; and Archigram’s Instant City Death Valley project? The answer: Los Angeles in the late 1960s and ’70s—a productively unstable environment, conducive to exchanges between artistic and architectural practices, processes, tools, sites, materials, and even audiences. Lavin’s exhibition and catalogue, under the auspices of the Getty Research Institute’s “Pacific