KRISTOPHER MCKAY© SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION, 2019/COURTESY OF OMA/PIETERNEL VAN VELDEN/LUCA LOCATELLI AMO's selection of unique and highly specific conditions distributed across the globe serves as a framework for their research, and represents where the world is headed.

Renowned architect Rem Koolhaas foresees a new rural sublime at the Guggenheim

Dutch architect and Harvard professor Rem Koolhaas is not a man one typically associates with nature－but a new exhibition is set to change that. The Rotterdam-born head of OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, which he founded 45 years ago) and its experimental research arm AMO has made a name for dazzling, dizzying urban projects that emblazon their respective cities like exclamation marks: the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, the Fondazione Prada in Milan and the Seattle Central Library.

Despite Koolhaas's innovative, avant-garde totems, he has somehow avoided the somewhat disparaging "starchitect" moniker directed at many of his contemporaries. His latest project, Countryside, The Future, is showing at the Guggenheim in New York until Aug 14. The exhibition sees him explore the radical changes happening in rural areas. Despite increasingly large numbers of the global population living and working in cities, these locations only account for two percent of the world's surface.