Countryside: The Future, on view now at the Guggenheim, doesn’t feel like an exhibition. It feels like a textbook projected onto the museum’s iconic curving surfaces.

Working with graphic designer Irma Bloom, curators AMO, Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal Bantal have taken many bytes of research, analysis and opinion, and printed it on curtains hanging along the museum’s outer wall, and, directly, in vinyl text running along its ceiling and guardrails. It’s a whole lot of data and a whole lot of Helvetica.

Typically visiting the gallery on a Friday evening is the perfect dinner party pre-game; the scene is chic, poised, knowing. Last week the crowd, diminished by pandemic restrictions, was listless, reading wall texts dutifully, but ultimately, as they reached the top, worn out. They wanted a show and got a lecture.

True confession: I didn’t read everything, I didn’t even look at everything. But what was apparent was a nostalgia for the pre-digital and pre-technological. The first wall text, at the base of the ramp, juxtaposes a photo of three rosy-cheeked teenage Russian farm girls from 1905, standing and offering plates of food, with another of contemporary workers inside an industrial hothouse. It reads: The countryside is a stable environment where everyone—man, woman, child—knows their place. There is a pride in costume and products… The sentiment is comically retrograde. One of the last images of the show, at the top of the ramp, is a poster of Koolhaas standing with group of men and women in dark suits, surveying an enormous spread of farmland, possibly pitching ideas. It’s a tired image of the modern architect as cultural savior, particularly sad because Koolhas began his career in sly opposition to it.

The strongest shows at the Guggenheim engage the sculptural drama of the architecture. Giacometti’s figures, Frank Gehry’s architectural models, and Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture all shone within the gallery’s curving walls and tilted floors. At Countryside there are some small objects on stands along the ramp but almost all the material is, both literally and metaphorically flat; it doesn’t provoke. There are some small objects (a drone, a satellite, and bale of hay) hung in a single cable above the ground floor pool, but they’re swallowed by the monumental space. If Rem Koolhaas wants to turn back to a world that is more primal and richly physical, why didn’t he give us an exhibit that is?

There was a summit of architecture critics last week to launch Alexandra Lange’s new book Writing About Architecture. Julie Iovine scored points early on, when she said that good writing mattered far more than good criticism. She read extraordinary passages from Reyner Banham and Esther McCoy out loud, which landed those authors on my must-read list. Then she lost points at the end when she said that architects can’t write, a generalization that hits awfully close to home. The emotional highlight was when Lange read a famous excerpt from the late Herbert Muschamp’s 1997 New York Times Magazine cover story on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. In the passage, which was even excerpted in the writer’s obituary, Muschamp describes returning to his hotel room at Bilbao, seeing a woman in a white dress on the street below, and, all at once, understanding something vital about the building. He writes, “[T]he building I’d just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe." Fifteen years later the panelists still found the reference "galling” (Iovine’s word) and rattled on about the eccentricities of the writing, including its stupendous length, starchitect worship, hyperbole, and mythopoetic prose.

Their stony reactions sent me back to the original text, in which Muschamp follows the Marilyn reference with this lucid perception: “What twins the actress and the building in my memory is that both of them stand for an American style of freedom. That style is voluptuous, emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material, mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child… " Muschamp’s essay is, in addition to a hagiography of Gehry and a critical account of the building, an attempt to understand architecture as a popular culture and to claim, for just one moment, in a tumbling world order, an American cultural victory. It’s rich and magnificent overwriting, which often happens when a serious writer tackles a subject that matters dearly to him. Here the building seems too big for the writing, even Muschamp’s writing, and remains, somehow, just out of reach. The heated language makes it clear that Muschamp loves architecture, something that’s not so clear about the critics on the panel.

March 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses