BMW Guggenheim Lab Germany, Berlin temporary public space project, Prenzlauer Berg building

BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin : Pfefferberg

Temporary Public Space in Prenzlauer Berg design by Atelier Bow-Wow Architects

post updated 22 May 2024

BMW Guggenheim Lab Opens in Berlin on June 15

Second Stop on Six-Year Global Tour Focuses on Citizen Participation in Shaping Cities

Worldwide Call for Ideas to “Make” Urban Comfort Launched in Collaboration with GOOD

15 Jun 2012

BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin

BERLIN, June 15, 2012 – The BMW Guggenheim Lab opens today in Berlin, the second stop on the project’s six-year global tour. Offering free programs from June 15 to July 29, 2012, the BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin is a temporary public space and online forum encouraging open dialogue about issues related to urban life.

BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin:

photos : Christian Richters © 2012 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

A local think tank with a global perspective, the BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin focuses on practical making and doing, with programs designed to empower residents with tools and ideas to actively engage in city change. The Lab is located in Prenzlauer Berg at Schönhauser Allee 176 in the Pfefferberg complex, a converted nineteenth-century brewery. The Lab is open Wednesday through Friday, 2-10 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 12–10 pm. All programs are free of charge and will be offered in German or in English with German translation.

“We are delighted to open the BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin and begin a vibrant period of public discussion and debate about how citizens can shape the cities in which they live,” said Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. “We look forward to welcoming residents from throughout Berlin as well as visitors from around the world to join us in this groundbreaking urban experiment.”

“Together with the city of Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum, we look forward to following the vibrant discussions to come at the BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin,” said Frank-Peter Arndt, Member of the Board of Management, BMW AG. “During more than 40 years of worldwide cultural engagement, we have always believed in the value of public dialogue and the support of innovative and unconventional ideas. The Guggenheim is the perfect collaborator to provide and ensure an open forum for this critical, multi-disciplinary exploration of urban life.”

The BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin is presented in cooperation with ANCB The Metropolitan Laboratory.

BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin Programming

Under the umbrella of Confronting Comfort , the theme of the Lab’s first two-year cycle, programming for the Berlin Lab focuses on the importance of “doing and making” to bring about city change. The Lab explores issues of contemporary urban life, from infrastructure to technology to sustainability, through programs that encourage visitors to participate and share questions, answers, thoughts, and dialogue.

“The goal of the BMW Guggenheim Lab is to spark a conversation about the future of cities and to create a forum where people of all backgrounds can create and share ideas,” said Maria Nicanor, Curator, BMW Guggenheim Lab. “Berlin is the ideal city to develop the Lab’s philosophy further, precisely because of its deeply rooted system of citizen participation.”

Programs have been developed by the Berlin Lab Team (José Gómez-Márquez, Carlo Ratti, Corinne Rose, and Rachel Smith), an international, multidisciplinary group of innovators and experts led by Guggenheim curator Maria Nicanor, with contributions from local organizations. The schedule, which can be found on the BMW Guggenheim Lab website , will include more than one hundred events at the Pfefferberg site and throughout the city.

Programs concentrate on four main topics

Empowerment Technologies (June 15-24)
José Gómez-Márquez , The Little Devices Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, and a pioneer in the field of health technology innovations, will lead a series of “do-it-yourself” workshops focused on building one’s own city by “hacking” and transforming urban spaces.

Dynamic Connections (June 27–July 6)
Rachel Smith , principal transport planner with AECOM, based in Brisbane, Australia, will lead programs focused on sustainable mobility and community-building.

Urban Micro-Lens (July 7–18)
Berlin-based artist and psychologist Corinne Rose , who works with photography and video and teaches at the Bern University of the Arts, Switzerland, will explore the intersection between psychology, architecture, and art with programs that address perception, communication, and emotions in city life.

SENSEable City (July 19–29)
Architect and engineer Carlo Ratti , who practices in Italy and directs the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, will lead programs examining how new technologies are transforming the way we understand, design, and live in cities.

“The city of Berlin is proud to join the BMW Guggenheim Lab in advancing its goal of engaging the public to identify new ideas and strategies for the challenges cities face today,” said Klaus Wowereit, Mayor of Berlin. “The Lab is a pioneering initiative that encourages open dialogue and different points of view, and that’s what Berlin—one of the most creative and innovative cities in the world—is all about.”

“We welcome the BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin to Prenzlauer Berg and are thrilled that the Lab’s free programming will address issues of particular relevance to the neighborhood and the city,” said Matthias Köhne, Mayor of Pankow. “The communities of Pankow and Prenzlauer Berg and citizens throughout Berlin will make an important contribution to the Lab and provide a special perspective to this global project.”

In addition to programs based at the Pfefferberg site, the Berlin Lab offers a variety of citywide explorations, such as guided tours, field trips, and walking workshops. Details can be found on the BMW Guggenheim Lab website.

Activities at the BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin will be documented on the project’s blog, Lab | Log , which also will feature interviews with BMW Guggenheim Lab contributors.

rendering from BQ

BMW Guggenheim Lab and GOOD Call for “City Forward” Ideas
In collaboration with GOOD, the BMW Guggenheim Lab has launched a worldwide, online call for ideas to “make” urban comfort, asking: “How would you transform a public space in your city to make it more comfortable?” The public is invited to submit forward-thinking, innovative, imaginative, surprising, or unconventional ideas that would enhance people’s experience in a public space. Entries may be submitted to good.is/city-forward beginning June 19, 2012. Selected entries will be highlighted on the BMW Guggenheim Lab and GOOD websites and social media channels.

GOOD is a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward. The GOOD.is website is an ongoing exploration of what GOOD is and what it can be.

Visitor Information
All BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin programs are free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis during operating hours. Advance online registration is required for select programs. The Lab is open Wednesday through Friday, 2–10 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 12-10 pm.

About the Architecture and Design
Lightweight and compact, with a structural skeleton built of carbon fiber, the mobile structure for the first two-year cycle of the BMW Guggenheim Lab has been designed by the Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow 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 can view 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.

The graphic identity for the first cycle of the BMW Guggenheim Lab has been developed by Seoul-based graphic designers Sulki & Min.

About the BMW Guggenheim Lab
The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a joint initiative of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the BMW Group. Housed in a mobile structure designed by Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow, the BMW Guggenheim Lab launched in the summer of 2011 in New York. Over six years, the BMW Guggenheim 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 BMW Guggenheim Lab will travel to Mumbai in winter 2012–13. Details about the Lab’s second cycle will be announced in the months to come. The BMW Guggenheim Lab is curated by David van der Leer and Maria Nicanor of the Guggenheim Museum.

3 Apr 2012

BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin

BMW Guggenheim Lab to Open in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg Neighborhood on June 15, 2012

NEW YORK, NY, April 3, 2012 – The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is pleased to announce that the BMW Guggenheim Lab will open in the Pfefferberg complex, in the Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. The BMW Guggenheim Lab—a temporary public space and online forum encouraging open dialogue about issues related to urban living—will offer free public programs from June 15 to July 29, 2012.

BMW Guggenheim Lab
Architects’ model, New York City site
Discussion setting:

photo : courtesy Atelier Bow-Wow

“We are sincerely grateful to Klaus Wowereit, Mayor of Berlin, Franz Schulz, Mayor of Kreuzberg, Matthias Koehne, Mayor of Pankow, the Berlin Senate, and the citizens of Berlin for their outpouring of support for our project, and we are thrilled to move forward with the BMW Guggenheim Lab in the great city of Berlin,” said Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. “The decision to relocate the Lab was not an easy one, but we are very pleased to have so quickly confirmed such a suitable alternative and to continue the urgent and important discussions we have begun about cities, and specifically about Berlin, at the Pfefferberg site. The Lab can only flourish through input and participation from people of all viewpoints, so in that sense the Berlin Lab has already begun.”

Pfefferberg, a former industrial complex that houses artists’ studios, galleries, and restaurants, was first chosen as the site for the BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin in June 2011. In January 2012, the Guggenheim Foundation announced plans to move the location of the Lab to Kreuzberg, on an expansive lot at the corner of Cuvrystrasse and Schlesische Strasse, along the River Spree. These plans were subsequently withdrawn because of concerns that the project would be disrupted.

BMW Guggenheim Lab
Architects’ model, New York City site
View from Houston Street:

photo : courtesy Atelier Bow-Wow

Maria Nicanor, curator of the Lab for Berlin, stated, “The Lab Team and I have been working in Berlin for months to develop programs with this city, along with the help of many friends in the community. Speaking personally, I feel happy to be moving forward and grateful to be doing it with the co-operation of BMW. They have respected our complete curatorial freedom from the beginning of the project and supported us in every decision we have made.”

The BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin

Programming for the Berlin Lab has been developed by the Guggenheim Museum. All programs have been created by the Berlin Lab Team (José Gómez-Márquez, Rachel Smith, Corinne Rose and Carlo Ratti), an international, multidisciplinary team of innovators and experts led by Guggenheim curator Maria Nicanor. In addition to programs based at the Pfefferberg site, the Berlin Lab will offer a variety of city-wide explorations. All programs will be free of charge. As programs are developed, media updates will be issued.

Under the umbrella of Confronting Comfort, the theme of the Lab’s first two-year cycle, programming for the Berlin Lab will center on the topic of “Making” and the importance of citizens participating in the creation of the cities they wish to inhabit. The programs have been designed to address ideas of particular relevance to Berlin as well as global urban issues. Lectures, hands-on workshops, and events at the Berlin Lab will be organized around four main topics:

Empowerment Technologies

José Gómez-Márquez, a pioneer in the field of health technology innovations, will lead a series of “do-it-yourself” workshops focused on the tangible aspects of building one’s own city by “hacking” and transforming urban spaces.

Dynamic Connections

Rachel Smith works with transportation issues and will lead programs focused on sustainable mobility and community-building.

Urban Micro-Lens

Berlin-based artist Corinne Rose will explore the intersection between psychology, architecture, and art with programs that address perception, communication, and emotion in city life.

Senseable City

Architect Carlo Ratti will lead programs examining how new technologies are transforming the way we understand, design, and live in cities.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin will be presented in collaboration with ANCB-Metropolitan Laboratory.

BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin information from The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Previously:

31 Oct 2011

BMW Guggenheim Lab

BMW Guggenheim Lab Ends Successful New York City Run with More than 300,000 Participants from Around the World

BMW Guggenheim Lab

Next Stop Berlin on Nine-City, Six-Year Tour

NEW YORK, NY, October 28, 2011 – At the close of the inaugural BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York City on October 16, Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Frank-Peter Arndt, Member of the Board of Management, BMW AG, announced that the Lab attracted 54,000 visitors from 60 countries during its 2 1/2–month run, from August 3 to October 16, 2011, and that 329,000 users more than 150 countries have visited the bmwguggenheimlab.org website.

BMW Guggenheim Lab
Architects’ model, New York City site
View from Houston Street and Second Avenue, showing cafe structure, garden, and main BMW Guggenheim Lab structure (in background):

photo : courtesy Atelier Bow-Wow

BMW Guggenheim Lab
Architects’ model, New York City site
View from Houston Street, showing a workshop setting:

photo : courtesy Atelier Bow-Wow

During its six-year run, which will conclude in late 2016, the BMW Guggenheim Lab will travel to nine cities in three successive cycles, each with its own distinct theme and architectural structure, to help raise awareness of important urban challenges and yield sustainable benefits for cities around the world. Berlin is the next stop for the Lab, in late spring 2012, to be followed by Mumbai in late 2012.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is curated by David van der Leer, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Urban Studies, and Maria Nicanor, Assistant Curator, Architecture.

21 Jun 2011

BMW Guggenheim Lab New York

BMW Guggenheim Lab
Architects’ model, New York City site
View from Houston Street, showing a discussion setting:

photo : courtesy Atelier Bow-Wow

NEW YORK, NY, May 6, 2011 – Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Jim OʼDonnell, President and CEO, BMW North America, LLC, announced today that the BMW Guggenheim Lab will launch in New York City from August 3 to October 16. Following the New York installation, the BMW Guggenheim Lab will travel to Berlin in spring/summer 2012, and to a city in Asia to be announced later this year. Conceived as an urban think tank and mobile laboratory, the BMW Guggenheim Lab will explore issues confronting contemporary cities and provide a public place and online forum for sharing ideas and practical solutions. The BMW Guggenheim Lab and all of its programming will be free to the public. The new website (bmwguggenheimlab.org) and online communities will create and extend the opportunity to participate in this multidisciplinary urban experiment worldwide.

BMW Guggenheim Lab
Architects’ model, New York City site
Communal dinner setting:

photo : courtesy Atelier Bow-Wow

BMW Guggenheim Lab Design News

The Architecture

With a structural skeleton built of carbon fiber, the lightweight and compact BMW Guggenheim Lab has been designed by Atelier Bow-Wow as a “traveling toolbox.” The lower half of the structure, a present-day version of the Mediterranean loggia, will be left open at most times. Its configuration will change periodically throughout the run of the BMW Guggenheim Lab to meet the needs of particular programs developed by the BGL Team. The cross-pollination and user interaction that will be an integral part of the BMW Guggenheim Labʼs programs find their counterpart in the upper part of the structure, which houses a flexible rigging system and is wrapped in a semitransparent mesh.

Through this external skin, visitors will be able to catch glimpses of the extensive apparatus of tools that will be lowered or raised from the fully enclosed toolbox canopy according to the BMW Guggenheim Labʼs manifold programming needs. The ground space can shift from a formal lecture setting with a stage, to the scene for celebratory gatherings or for workshops with tables for hands-on experiments. A video of Atelier Bow-Wowʼs architectural rendering of the BMW Guggenheim Lab structure can be viewed at youtube.com/bmwguggenheimlab. A series of smaller wooden structures to be placed in close proximity to the main BMW Guggenheim Lab structure will provide space for restrooms and a cafe.

Whereas the main structure is forward-looking in its materiality and highly urban in its programmatic approach, the design of the restrooms and cafe references timeless timber construction that has been used in many settings, both rural and urban. Together, the wooden structures and the main BMW Guggenheim Lab form a temporary twenty-first-century ensemble that in each city will frame a particular urban void. After the BMW Guggenheim Lab departs for Berlin, the improvements made to the currently vacant lot in New York City will remain, allowing a formerly unusable city space to become an accessible public park.

About Atelier Bow-Wow

Atelier Bow-Wow (Tokyo)
Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow-Wow,
design architects for Cycle 1 of the BMW Guggenheim Lab:

photo © Atelier Bow-Wow

Atelier Bow-Wow was established in Tokyo in 1992 by the husband-and-wife team of Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima. Best known for its surprising, idiosyncratic, yet highly usable residential projects in dense urban environments, the firm has developed its practice based on a profound and unprejudiced study of existing cultural, economic, and environmental conditions—a study that led it to propose the term “pet architecture” for the multitude of odd, ungainly, but functional little buildings wedged into tiny sites around Tokyo.

Atelier Bow-Wow has also acquired an enthusiastic following through its Micro Public Space projects, as well as innovative projects for exhibitions such as the 2010 Venice Biennale (as an official representative of Japan) and the São Paulo Bienal, and at venues such as the Hayward Gallery in London, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, The Gallery at REDCAT in Los Angeles, the Japan Society in New York, and the OK Offenes Kulturhaus Oberösterreich in Linz, Austria. More information about Atelier Bow-Wow can be found at bow-wow.jp.

Atelier Bow-Wow

About the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Founded in 1937, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of art, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods, through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications. Currently the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation owns and operates the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal in Venice, and provides programming and management for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

The Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin is the result of a collaboration, begun in 1997, between the Guggenheim Foundation and Deutsche Bank. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a museum of modern and contemporary art designed by Frank Gehry on Saadiyat Island and adjacent to the main island of Abu Dhabi city, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, is currently in progress. More information about the Foundation can be found at guggenheim.org.

BMW Guggenheim Lab New York images / information from Tangram 3DS

Location: Pfefferberg Complex, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, Germany