All images: BMW Guggenheim Lab Architects’ model, New York City site View from Houston Street,
showing a discussion setting. Photo courtesy of Atelier Bow-Wow.
On May 6, BMW and the Guggenheim Foundation announced their upcoming collaboration: the BMW Guggenheim Lab. This six-year partnership will tour cities throughout the world, examining contemporary challenges facing urban environments and seeking how best to address them. This tour will begin in New York on August 3 before traveling to Berlin and Asia.
The BMW Guggenheim Lab will serve as a mobile think tank, enlisting the assistance of alternating lab teams (nominated by an international advisory board) to create a series of dynamic programs that will contemplate and propose solutions to how to continue to develop urban living spaces. These programs will be open to the public, including the incorporation of an online forum, allowing participants to join in brainstorming and solution proposals.
Over six years, this think tank will focus on three different themes from three mobile headquarters that change as the teams travel from city to city. Each vehicle will be designed by different architectural teams and will reflect the type of environments in which they are located. The first, which will be located at 33 East First St, New York, NY, is designed by the Tokyo-based architectural studio Atelier Bow-Wow, and has been crafted to accommodate the implicit challenges of highly developed and populous environment.
Information is available on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Foursquare, making this project an accessible, exciting, and design-conscious way to get involved in developing our always evolving environments.
