A Box of Ideas

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is “a mobile laboratory traveling around the world to inspire innovative ideas for urban life” and is, as the title indicates, a collaboration between the BMW Group and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Housed in a mobile structure, designed by Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow, the Lab launched in the summer of 2011 in New York City where it hosted 56,000 visitors over ten weeks. Over six years, the Lab will travel to a total of nine cities around the world in three successive two-year cycles, each with its own theme and structure. Following Berlin—the second stop of the tour—the Lab will travel to Mumbai in winter 2012-13. Each of the three incarnations of the lab is designed by a different architect and travels to three cities in the course of its cycle. The theme of the first two-year cycle of the Lab is "Confronting Comfort". It explores the notion of individual and collective comfort as well as the urgent need for environmental and social responsibility with a strong emphasis on actively ‘making’ it happen. A quick glance at the Berlin agenda reveals a strong making agenda, with topics such as ‘making health’, ‘making environment’ and the ‘politics of making’. Part urban think tank, part community center and public gathering space, the Lab is conceived to inspire public discourse in cities around the world, through the Lab website and online social communities. Offering workshops, talks, tours and other free events, it empowers and encourages citizens to initiate change from the bottom up; taking ownership of their city and the spaces within it.