Pop Up Museum!?!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/arts/design/bmw-guggenheim-lab-to-open-as-pop-up-in-east-village.html?hpw

A Pop-Up Guggenheim as Urban Laboratory

By CAROL VOGEL

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has long been known for creating landmark museum buildings, from its 1959 headquarters by Frank Lloyd Wright, on Fifth Avenue, to Frank Gehry’s 1997 billowing titanium Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. But this week it is opening a very different kind of structure, a pop-up gathering space on a gritty, city-owned lot in the East Village that until a few weeks ago was “all rats and rubble,” as one Guggenheim official described it.

Called the BMW Guggenheim Lab — it is sponsored by the car company — and opening on Wednesday, it is part think tank, part open-air forum, part community center, all nestled on a vacant sliver of land between two tenements. Its goal is to engage New Yorkers in discussions about urban living.

For the last few years pop-up shops have come and gone all over New York, giving real estate developers a temporary solution to the eyesore of an empty lot or storefront, and retailers the chance to test concepts or brands without making long-term commitments. But the Guggenheim project is believed to the first example of a major New York museum getting in on the act.

“When people say we’re taking it to the streets, we literally are,” said Richard Armstrong, director of the Guggenheim Foundation. “Hopefully this will be a petri dish of ideas for the decision makers of tomorrow. But it is no glamorous version of a Greek temple.”

The once-forgotten T-shaped plot, 2,000 square feet between Houston Street and East First Street, just east of Second Avenue, has been cleaned up and transformed by the creation of a two-story structure with a frame of black carbon fiber — commonly used to make tennis rackets but until now, the architects say, unheard of as a building material — and punctuated by a pair of hanging electronic video screens front and back. The design, by the Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow, appears deceptively simple, with an open space at street level that can comfortably accommodate about 300 people.

But the upper portion, wrapped in two layers of semitransparent black-carbon-fiber mesh, conceals everything necessary to make the space work. Specially designed modular wood bleachers, tables and pastel-painted folding chairs can be secreted away in metal containers and then raised or lowered on a rigging system. Everything, including the carbon-fiber rain gutters, was created to fold up for easy travel.

New York will be the first stop for the lab on a worldwide tour that will also include Berlin and Mumbai. There will eventually be three labs, each with its own mobile structure designed by a different architect, and each dealing with a separate theme pertaining to urban life — in the case of the lab opening on Wednesday, “Confronting Comfort.” All three will travel to cities around the world, in a project slated to last six years. In each city curators will invite leaders in fields including architecture, art, design, technology, education and science to participate in programs: lectures, workshops, games, performances and film screenings. All events will be free to the public.

The labs are the brainchild of two Guggenheim Museum curators in their early 30s, David van der Leer and Maria Nicanor, who stress that this is not some sort of ephemeral museum.

“It’s a new hybrid, a place where we can learn from each other,” Mr. van der Leer said.

Nor did the curators envision the labs as sanctuaries of aesthetic refinement at a remove from the cities around them, like the sleek traveling pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid for Chanel that appeared in Central Park three years ago.

“We wanted the Guggenheim Labs to be in the middle of an urban environment where people live, work and hang out,” Mr. van der Leer said.

More than 100 events and activities are planned for the site, which will operate through Oct. 16. (The schedule is at bmwguggenheimlab.org.) Each will center on the “Confronting Comfort” theme, which Mr. van der Leer explained involves the quest to make city life more livable.

“Comfort is generally related to domestic space, but what about the idea of confronting existing notions of comfort in an urban environment?” he asked. He and Ms. Nicanor selected Atelier Bow-Wow, they said, because they were seeking midcareer architects with experience in small urban projects, and the firm fit that profile.

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, a partner at Bow-Wow, said he knew he had a challenge on his hands the first time he saw the site, 100 feet long and a mere 22 feet wide at its narrowest.

“It was a leftover, narrow, T-shaped space, and I quickly realized it was better to use the metaphor of a theater rather than an exhibition space, because theaters are constantly changing, like the lab,” he said in a telephone interview from his Tokyo office.

That inspired what he called the fly system — common in theaters — which he designed for the ceiling of the structure, neatly tucked behind the carbon-fiber mesh and used to store the bleachers and everything else.

Nothing here is slick. The graffiti-covered brick walls along two sides of the site were left exposed.
“Everybody expects an iconic building from the Guggenheim, but we specifically said we did not want that,” Mr. van der Leer said. “We wanted to tread lightly, to be neighborhood friendly.”

On the Houston Street end of the T-shaped plot is a wood hut and picnic tables, the site of a cafe that will be open throughout the lab’s run. There are also landscaped pathways and public toilets.

The design is intended to adapt easily to new environments. In Berlin, for instance, it will be on the site of a factory. “Every one will be different in each place,” Ms. Nicanor said. “Here it’s supposed to feel homey, like an urban living room.”