The rural world is the future. So says the great guru of international architecture, Rem Koolhaas, in the major show that recently opened its doors in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York. The title, ‘Countryside, the Future,’ is a whole declaration of intent that is bound to surprise many, given how it denotes a radical turn in the Rotterdam-based architect’s interests. Before, he was into themes like urban chaos as generator of beauty, the spaces of globalization, and our relationship with heritage, but with this new exhibition and the book that comes with it, he has clearly detached himself from the urban theme to focus on what is the “backof-house” of the metropolis, meaning the countryside. By means of a huge deployment of documents produced by Koolhaas / AMO in collaboration with a collective of universities, and using powerful images like cutting-edge greenhouses and Tesla megafactories, ‘Countryside, the Future’ sets out to scan the thousand nodes that engage rural areas in a tangle of production systems, geopolitics, genetics, and environmental networks. The world’s most radical face is no longer in cities, but rather out in the countryside, Koolhaas dixit, and we architects had better lose no time in accepting this fact, lest we find ourselves falling behind all over again.