KRISTOPHER MCKAY© SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION, 2019/COURTESY OF OMA/PIETERNEL VAN VELDEN/LUCA LOCATELLI "New Nature". Highly artificial and sterile environments are employed to create the ideal organic specimen. Today's glass houses contain all the essential ingredients of life but none of the redundancies: sun, soil, and water are emulated, optimized and automated.

"In the past decades, I have noticed that while much of our energies and intelligence have been focused on the urban areas of the world－under the influence of global warming, the market economy, American tech companies, African and European initiatives, Chinese politics and other forces－the countryside has changed almost beyond recognition," says Koolhaas.

When the term "smart city" was coined in 2012, Koolhaas had noticed his interests moving in the opposite direction: "Through regular visits to a Swiss village－it was the sudden disappearance of cows that alerted me－I had begun to realize that, through an accumulation of discrete individual changes, the countryside was actually transforming more drastically than the city. The story of this transformation is largely untold－and it is particularly meaningful for AMO to present it in one of the world's great museums, in one of the world's densest cities."

Koolhaas has long called for greater rural awareness, and has even claimed that the obsession with cities has blinded people to what has been happening in the countryside, becoming a factor in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. To further his rural cause, the architect has enlisted students from Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts, Kenya's University of Nairobi, the Netherlands' Wageningen University and the US's Harvard Graduate School of Design.