KRISTOPHER MCKAY© SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION, 2019/COURTESY OF OMA/PIETERNEL VAN VELDEN/LUCA LOCATELLI "Rigidity Enables Frivolity". The frivolity of urban life has necessitated the organization, abstraction and automation of the countryside at a vast and unprecedented scale. Left: Mishka Henner, Feedlots, 2013. Right: Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, 2018.

The Guggenheim, for its part, says the exhibition "will mark a shift from a focus on the urban to the rural, remote, deserted, and wild territories collectively investigated here as 'countryside'". It aims to shed light on the urgent environmental, political and socio-economic changes facing the countryside in places such as China, California and South America.

The museum elaborates on the theme:"Countryside will offer speculation on the future through evidence of transition from a diverse range of sites by documenting examples from around the world as case studies, exposing the dramatic transformations that have taken place in the countryside while our attention has been collectively focused on the city."

For example, on the subject of Chinese trains cutting through the Kenyan landscape as part of President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, Koolhaas says such developments "force Kenya to rethink its models of growth, shedding modernism's fixation on the megalopolis to experiment, instead with the 'village' as a way forward."

Topics under the microscope include artificial intelligence, global warming, political radicalization, mass and micro-migration, human－animal ecosystems, the impact of digital on the physical world, subsidies and even tax incentives. Experimental projects include glass-house farming, in which "superfluous" light from photosynthesis is removed, as well as a reappraisal of the amount of land needed to raise cattle. Nature has suddenly become the new architectural sublime－and architects of the future will confront a new reality when designing in rural areas.

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