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?

Photograph © AMO

OTHERWORLDLY

The Fondazione Prada in Milan is a former distillery that’s been remade by the luxury brand as an art center. It was opened in 2015, after OMA Europe refurbished the existing structures and added three new ones. The ten-building campus lies along the city’s southern edge, in a precinct of warehouses, factories, and abandoned lots, and is secured with a masonry wall and uniformed guards. Stepping inside from the sidewalk is like falling into another world, one that’s radically interior, like a convent, a prison, or an asylum.

The artworks are sealed away in a series of strange, seemingly unrelated structures, that set a tone of unsettling quiet. It would be a sterile experience if not for the dazzling quality of the architecture. The buildings are cerebral in their planning, restrained in their geometries, and luxurious in their finishes. The Cinema is framed in brushed aluminum and clad with mirrored stainless steel panels. The Hall floor is a richly figured travertine. Staircases in all of the buildings are lined with perforated brushed stainless steel panels. Pragmatic elements like vents, access panels and stair handrails are gorgeously concealed.

Circulation, both through the campus and through each building, is obtuse. There are lots of ramps and staircases, and no door handles. Most of the buildings are entered through immense, unmarked automatic sliding doors. Signage is minimal, and no artwork is visible from outside. Young guards, dressed in unisex blue nylon Prada topcoats and Doc Martens, are required to give detailed directions to visitors. The restrooms are particularly difficult to navigate. All surfaces in these underground facilities, including the ceiling and the stall partitions, are constructed from a heavy steel grate. Dark and disorienting, the space is also slightly maddening. A sensible adult wonders, Where is the door? Where are the stalls? Where are the paper towels? And where, again, is the door?

Recent OMA projects have had a disappointingly commercial aspect, but this one bears the sly, witty signature of Rem Koolhas. The Fondazione has no center, no front face, and no real image. Its most iconic element (until the high-rise Torre under construction is completed) is the “Haunted House,” an existing four-story concrete building that’s been finished in a flat, softly-glowing 24-karat gold leaf, and that houses the permanent collection. It’s nestled at the end of a drive inside the campus, so that it remains invisible from the outside, and from most other points on the campus. Its small bare chambers offer sculptures by Robert Gober and Louise Bourgeois and, more alluringly, opulent views into the city. Yet one isn’t permitted to step onto the balconies or take photos; one remains caught inside.

Photograph courtesy of Fondazione Prada, Milano. By Bas Princen, 2015.

December 10, 2016 by Nalina Moses