Inhabitant lecture at Harvard GSD October 5, 2020 https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/metahaven/

Last April, we went out on bicycles and followed the blossoms. From street to street we crisscrossed, trailing the path of their delightful colors.

As foxes, wolves, and deer took to the cities, parts of a world in lockdown gave in to a silent dream.

The skies were empty. Emails skirted across the planet like tiny comets of kindness. Skype rituals and Zoom exchanges took place against the backdrop of private rooms: a world, at once more intimate and more distant, made itself available as live TV, replacing the physical meeting, supplanting physical social interaction with an audiovisual simulacrum.

We had a brief window of time to take notice of the recent past, in which our senses had seemed to have become paralyzed by cascading urgencies. How could we respond to the imperative of being in the now, of inhabiting the present? Can a work absorb the moment in time of its making without becoming like the news?

It was really impressive to see each of my classmates present this past Monday. Several of us worked in teams to develop our projects over the course of the semester, while others worked individually. In every case, the work presented was well-developed and thoroughly researched. From our mid-term review to our final, each project had gained a clearer purpose and position within the exhibition as a whole. While I cannot divulge what exactly we were researching and designing this semester—you’ll have to wait until the ‘Countryside: Future of the World’ exhibition opens at the Guggenheim in 2019 to find out—I can say that the topics addressed by the exhibition are diverse, and that the methods of representation and curation are unconventional. As it turns out, the countryside is a vast and unpredictable terrain, and expressing the many meanings and futures of ‘countryside’ within the confines of a museum gallery is a formidable task. As my partner and I were told by Rem during our final review, the research and object list that we presented could very well take up the entire space of the Guggenheim. This was a common theme throughout the day: over the course of the semester each of us had developed several thick booklets, provisional plans, and models to represent the intent of each exhibition theme. Now the task would be to further edit the work—to locate its essence. Topics of extreme complexity and scale needed to be rendered comprehensible to a broad public. To summarize, distill, design, collect, and curate would not be enough. We needed to find a way to make argument into art. Within that curious spiral archetype dreamed up by Frank Lloyd Wright from 1943-1958 (just as highways and spiral interchanges were unfurling across the American landscape), curating the countryside comes with a particular challenge: how to not succumb to the idea that the future of the earth will be a downward spiral—a declensionist narrative in which the ground beneath our feet is swept away by sea-level rise and permafrost melt; in which our species buries itself in industrial waste and suffocates in the emissions of its own exhaust. As self-driving cars take to the streets to rework transportation networks, and as roboticization radically shifts the spatial and social organization of the countryside, taking our hands off the proverbial steering wheel and resigning ourselves to a future governed by technology and automation is simply not an option. A glance into the rear-view mirror shows us that the countryside is a historically under-designed space; and designers, architects, landscape architects, planners, community organizers and activists are all part of its future. The question is whether our roles will be passive and piecemeal; or active and collaborative. What if we re-routed our modern fixation on the metropolis and decided to take that obscure highway exit to Cimarron or Silverton, instead of always having our sights set on the city as our final destination? While the exhibition will invite visitors to ask questions like these, we don’t necessarily need to wait until Fall 2019 to begin the conversation. What does the future of the countryside look like to you? What will it look like for the next generation?  And facing these futures, what will be your position?