How can cities reimagine themselves together?
The Lab
A mobile laboratory traveling the world to inspire new ideas for urban life—a co-initiative of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the BMW Group.
For its inaugural New York residency, Atelier Bow-Wow’s structure landed at First Park in the East Village: part think tank, part public forum, part community center at street level.
A summer in New York
From August through October 2011, the Lab ran 188 public programs across 53 days—58 talks, 48 workshops, 28 screenings, 24 special events, 21 excursions, and nine fieldwork sessions.
All of it organized around Confronting Comfort: how cities balance individual and collective needs, and how urban environments can become more responsive to the people who live in them.
A transformable theater
Inside the Bow-Wow structure, the main space functioned as a reconfigurable theater—massive stage sets and furniture lifted and lowered on motorized chains between programs.
Each day brought a new layout: discussion forum, screening room, workshop floor. The architecture had to keep pace with the programming calendar.
My role
I ran all site technology for the New York residency—AV, playback, and the systems that kept the Lab running through a full summer of back-to-back public programs.
That meant facilitating daily change-overs between stage configurations and interfacing with invited presenters and artists across every talk, workshop, screening, and special event on the calendar.
Project Credits & Information
- Project type
- Platform
- Partner
- Guggenheim
- Agency
- —
- Role
- Lead Theater AV Specialist
- Credits
- Curated by David van der Leer, Maria Nicanor, Amara Antilla, and Stephanie Kwai.
- Press
- —
- Website
- bmwguggenheimlab.org
- Date
- 2011
