BMW Guggenheim Lab
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- 33 East First Street, 10003 New York, USA
- Year
- 2011
The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a mobile laboratory traveling to nine major cities worldwide over six years. The lab addresses issues of contemporary urban life through programs and public discourse. Its goal is the exploration of new ideas, experimentation, and ultimately the creation of forward-thinking solutions for city life.
The first two-year cycle of the BMW Guggenheim Lab has started in New York from August 3 to October 16, 2011.
The theme is Confronting Comfort. In New York, Berlin, and Asia, the Lab will explore how urban environments can be made more responsive to people’s needs, how people can feel more at ease in urban environments, and how to find a balance between notions of modern comfort and the urgent need for environmental and social responsibility.
Lightweight and compact, with a structural skeleton built of carbon fiber, the mobile structure for the first cycle of the BMW Guggenheim Lab has been designed as a “traveling toolbox.”
The structure’s lower half is a present-day version of the Mediterranean loggia, an open space that can easily be configured to accommodate the Lab’s various programs. The upper part of the structure houses a flexible rigging system and is wrapped in a semitransparent mesh. Through this external skin, visitors are able to catch glimpses of the extensive apparatus of “tools” that may be lowered or raised from the canopy according to the Lab’s programming needs, transforming the ground space into a formal lecture setting, a stage for a celebratory gathering, or a workshop with tables for hands-on experiments.