• by Karl Greenberg , October 1, 2010

BMW AG and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation have launched a six-year global program, BMW's largest global corporate campaign, featuring a series of mobile design labs and urban design.

The program, which taps people in architecture, art, science, design, technology, and education, comprises three mobile design labs that will travel to cities around the world to generate ideas for solving major issues that affect urban life.

Each will have its own architect, graphic designer, and theme -- and each goes to three major cities worldwide in separate, consecutive two-year cycles. The program includes site-specific events and educational programs as well as workshops, public discussions, performances, and formal and informal gatherings.

The first of the labs with the theme "Confronting Comfort; The City and You," will be in North America late next summer and will be ensconced in the U.S. through the fall and then move to cities in Europe and Asia, respectively.

The 5,000-square-foot lab will open public programming developed by the Lab Team together with Guggenheim staff. At the conclusion of each three-city cycle, the Guggenheim Museum in New York will run an exhibition on the lab dealing with issues raised by the tour.

"Our collaboration with BMW brings together three kinds of expertise -- an international museum, international design firms, and emerging talents from a number of different fields -- for a research-and-development project with almost limitless potential," said Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum, in a release. "We cannot predict, and do not want to predict, the outcomes of this open-ended experiment."

In each city, events and programs for the lab will be developed by a different four-member, multidisciplinary BMW Guggenheim Lab Team of early- to mid-career professionals who have been identified as emerging leaders in their fields, per the partner organizations. Team members will be nominated by an advisory committee from the creative, academic, and scientific fields.

Thomas Girst, spokesperson for cultural communications at Munich-based BMW Group, says BMW won't use the program as a marketing platform. "We don't have an agenda we are pursuing; it's a worldwide cultural engagement," he says. "We have for 40 years been doing hundreds of international projects focused on architecture, design, classical music, jazz, so it's really about being a good corporate citizen. The subtlety of our approach talks to the sophistication of how the company is doing sponsorships."

The effort will include a Web site, BMWGoogenheimLab.org, and Girst says BMW is hoping to be able to present a lab at the end of its two-year run at its BMW Museum in Munich. And he says that BMW will promote the labs via its own networks with streaming video and information on BMW's corporate and brand Web sites and Facebook.