The BMW Guggenheim Lab is an interdisciplinary mobile laboratory that will travel to nine cities over the course of six years. A collaboration between the BMW Group and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Lab is part urban think tank, part community center, and part gathering space, and explores issues of urban life through public programming and discourse.[1] Three different structures will house the Lab, each traveling to three cities. The first structure was designed by the Tokyo-based architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow. Seoul-based graphic designers Sulki & Min created the graphic identity for the project, including an interactive logo that will change over the course of the project.[2]
The concept behind the Lab was developed by David van der Leer, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Urban Studies, and Maria Nicanor, Assistant Curator, Architecture, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The Lab’s Advisory Committee is composed of internationally renowned experts in a range of fields and nominates members for each city’s Lab Team, an interdisciplinary group that will help create the programming for that location. The Advisory Committee members for the first three-city cycle of the project are: Daniel Barenboim, Elizabeth Diller, Nicholas Humphrey, Muchadeyi Masunda, Enrique Peñalosa, Juliet Schor, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Wang Shi.[3]
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The Lab was open from August 3 to October 16, 2011 in New York City’s East Village and was attended by over 54,000 visitors from 60 countries. [4] Members of the New York Lab Team were: Omar Freilla, founder and coordinator of Green Worker Cooperatives, Bronx, New York; Charles Montgomery, Canadian journalist and urban experimentalist; Olatunbosun Obayomi, Nigerian microbiologist and inventor; and architects and urbanists Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman, founders of ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensible], Rotterdam.[5]
The Lab will be open in Berlin from May 24 to July 29, 2012. Members of the Berlin Lab are: José Gómez-Márquez, program director for the Innovations in International Health Initiative (IIH) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); architect and engineer Carlo Ratti, who practices in Italy and directs the MIT Senseable City Lab; Berlin-based artist Corinne Rose, who works with photography and video and teaches at the Bern University of the Arts, Switzerland; and Rachel Smith, principal transport planner with AECOM, based in Brisbane. After Berlin, the Lab will travel to Mumbai in 2012-13. [6]