Editor’s Letter
“The countryside is a space that’s transforming faster than the most contemporary city.” SO SAYS DUTCH ARCHITECT AND scholar Rem Koolhaas, who helped organize a recent exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, “Countryside, The Future.” 1 The exhibit explores how the countryside has evolved throughout history and what implications those changes have for the future of our planet. Its timing, it turns out, was both unfortunate and prescient: unfortunate in that the novel coronavirus pandemic has forced the temporary closure of public institutions like the Guggenheim; prescient in that the lure of the countryside—a landscape with built-in social distance and the ensuing promise of simple pleasures—has never been stronger. After all, one can mistake the bucolic bliss evoked by country escapes like the four featured in this issue 2 for a paradisiacal…