Countryside, the Future

The Guggenheim's terrazzo floors are plastered with signs of agriculture and industry like a sticker book I had as a kid, only big; the walls, all the way up the rotunda, are covered by large-scale prints of relatively low-quality digital photos, fluorescent infographics, and blocks, grids, quilts of text. I'm dizzy, claustrophobic, eyes straining at the baroque tangles of information. This will not be a leisurely morning of viewing. I walk down and back up the ramp twice, each time with more ease. Only on that second time down am I able to penetrate the harsh surface enveloping me to engage the work. "The work" is basically a great aggregation of data trends (of climate, animal, and (most of all) human behavior) drawn by Rem Koolhaas, architecture think-tank AMO, and students. The work hardly exceeds the translation of statistics and histories, and when it does it rises like steam from hot water.
The "countryside" is evolving now more extremely than urban centers, revealing new and old ways of living in an increasingly precarious world. Rather than swallowed, how might the remaining non-urban space in the world be carefully related to? How might the very notion of urbanism be necessarily dissolving? How might it be reimagined? Countryside, the Future does not preach nor even welcome the viewer. Instead it asks for confrontation.