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Type:	Creative work
Title:	BMW-Guggenheim Lab: NY, Berlin, Mumbai
Author:	Morita, M. Atelier Bow-Wow,
Publisher:	BMW-Guggenheim
Publisher Place:	NY, Berlin, Mumbai
Issue Date:	2010
Description:	The BMW-Guggenheim Lab was conceived as a structure that would serve as venue for community engagement events and provocations in three cities: New York, Berlin and Mumbai. While a team was assembled to develop and run programmes, Morita was involved from the outset in evolving the architectural concept throughout transitions of the building to each locale. The original structure designed for NY was hoped to be relocatable to the others in urban positions expected to be similar even while events would respond to local cultures and needs. Instead, one finding of this experiment was that the structure and locations themselves would also be dictated by cultural specificity: Located in a tight public laneway in NY, Berliners refused to permit its erection in public space, and the sophisticated materiality of carbon fibre was substituted for new experiments with bamboo in India. The overall project research questions included: - How can buildings and landscapes nourish and facilitate vigorous, stimulating public spaces? - How can small, private structures embed or encourage larger civic engagements within or between them? - What temporal strategies or spatial tactics can be employed? Further questions which emerged included: How does and must architecture respond to place specificity in addressing these bigger questions and build on the cultural engagement it expects to find? How are the challenges to expectations embraced? While the very notion of the Lab was predicated on an experiment, the evolving delivery in three consecutive cities provided even more nuanced findings than expected. Along with numerous technical and material innovations (including adaptation of carbon fibre and of bamboo to unique structural propositions), the project was also concerned with advocacy and the role of architecture and architects. Ultimately it explored and found answers to a vexed and urgent question concerning the relevance of the profession: How does an architect help people talk about their city – using architecture? The significant outputs of the building and operation of the three labs were documented on a website that included diverse material developed as specifically appropriate to each locale (video and event documentation, interactive ‘games’, blogs and online correspondence). http://www.bmwguggenheimlab.org/what-is-the-lab/architecture http://www.bow-wow.jp/profile/2012/BGLb/index.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvT_L6KIJDM
Appears in Collections:	Architecture publications Aurora harvest 2

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