BMW Guggenheim Lab

Over the Lab’s six-year migration, there will be three distinct mobile structures and thematic cycles. Each structure will be designed by a different architect, and each will travel to three cities around the globe.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab launched in New York from August 3 to October 16, 2011, before traveling to Berlin and then Mumbai. Cycle 1 concludes with an exhibition presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2013. Two additional two-year cycles will follow, each with a new mobile structure and theme, concluding in the fall of 2016.

Free programs

Part urban think tank, part community center and public gathering space, the Lab is conceived to inspire public discourse in cities around the world and through the BMW Guggenheim Lab website and online social communities.
The public is invited to attend and to participate in free programs and experiments at the Lab. In addition, the BMW Guggenheim Lab website and social communities provide opportunities for participants around the world to engage with and to contribute to the ideas and experiments generated by the Lab.

Theme: Confronting Comfort

The theme for the first two-year cycle of the BMW Guggenheim Lab 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.

Architecture

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 by the Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow as a “traveling toolbox.”