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What We Believe
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    • 032c Dossier: COUNTRYSIDE

    Next week, Rem Koolhaas’ Countryside, The Future opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. To celebrate the occasion, we share early research by Koolhaas and OMA/AMO from the 032c archive, addressing the vast, mysterious terrain that makes up the majority of our planet.  

    Originally published in 032c Issue #23 (Winter 2012/2013)

    Contemplate the COUNTRYSIDE: open meadows of sun-gold wheat; flocks of sheep lingering over patches of clover; chickens, cats, and goats commingle in the barn-yard shade. It’s authentic to the city’s artifice. We, particularly those of us who make the city our home, know that the countryside is where our food, somehow, comes from. It’s also where we’ll spend lazy weekends reading paperbacks, stoking fires, and putting all sorts of packaged meat on the grill. The reality of today’s countryside is more nuanced. Far more. In fact, it’s radically different from the pre-technological idyll we’ve come to identify with through pop culture. Enter the yoga instructors, tax consultants, iHerd, the AstronautTM, Enviropig, and the Herakles Field AssistantTM; exeunt the rake, plow, bail spike, ail, and the milkmaid with the bucket.

    After more than 40 years of research on cities, REM KOOLHAAS turns his attention to the countryside. It’s under-examined, under-theorized, and along with AMO, the research arm of his office, OMA, the architect has amassed some surprising, even surreal, findings. In an exclusive essay for 032c and a case study on the contemporary Dutch polder,  Koolhaas explains what has transpired in the vast hinterlands during our century-long obsession with the city.

    Countryside, The Future opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on February 20th, 2020.

    032c Issue #23 Dossier online:

     

    Countryside by Rem Koolhaas (Part I)

     

    Countryside by Rem Koolhaas (Part II): Case Studies 

     

    Print-Only: Glossary of key terms, with a few neologisms of AMO’s own invention ;) 

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    • Deeper

  • “Globally, if we look at the 50 percent who live outside of cities, there are actually two billion people living in the countryside, not working in agriculture. They live in the countryside and we don’t know what they do there.” – Rem Koolhaas, “Countryside,” 032c Issue #23.

    🚜❓

    Opening this week at the Guggenheim museum in New York, “Countryside: The Future” exhibits the last decade of Koolhaas’ work outside the city – which, hopefully, has shed light on these activities.

  • “So this is how it is, I think. Stars rain from the sky like shards of glass. Time makes room for timelessness. Creation is always a catastrophe, a shattering. Everything has already happened. The past does not move through the present like a pointed finger or a shadowy confessor in a long cloak. The past is not told you so. Not this is how it all began. It is a knock on the door in the middle of the night. You open the door and no one is there. You cannot tell yourself it must be those feral boys from the corner house because it is too late even for them, and no you could not have heard the knock in your sleep because you’ve been wide awake all night like a hermit crab. So this is how it is. Stars fall from the sky like shot baby sparrows in Mao’s China. Books are imperishable only because turning them into ash takes so little (it’s not like blowing up buildings); they are imperishable only because they are so ready to survive, dispersed across the world, as trails of dust, memories, shreds. As to us, me and you, oh it’s simple. We are the broken vessels containing, spilling all over the place, those who came before us.”

    – MARIA TUMARKIN, Axiomatic. 

    Read our interview with the author. 

  • 032c Issue #36 cover photographer RENELL MEDRANO’s first European solo exhibition opened yesterday in London. Titled PAMPARA, the show is a product of Medrano’s exploration of her Dominican roots. “I wanted people to feel connected to a place I’m connected to,” she explains.