Starchitect Rem Koolhaas Makes the Case for Leaving Cities Behind
“Countryside, the Future” at the Guggenheim Museum discovers the joys of rural life—and that was before our current age of coronavirus.
Satellite imagery of farmland in North Dakota.
Photographer: David Heald/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
People have romanticized the countryside as long as there have been cities. From the ancient Roman poet Horace to German expressionists to the American communes of the 1970s, there’s an ongoing perception that the countryside represents an innocent agrarian past, whereas cities, built on sophisticated commerce, represent the technocentric future.
It’s not just a question of sentimentality. Metropolitan living does seem like the way forward, especially among proponents of environmental sustainability. The carbon footprint of a household in the center of a large, dense city is about half the national average, according to a 2014 study by the University of California at Berkeley, and households in suburbs are as much as twice the average.