Can you build a building without a program?  The Guggenheim’s summer pop-up inside the park along Houston Street at Bowery, designed by Atelier Bow-Wow, comes tantalizingly close.  It’s a spare steel frame wrapped in metal mesh, stuffed with A/V equipment, and furnished with fold-out chairs.  When I visited last weekend there was a trio of hippie chicks singing, and then a documentary about the politics of Central Africa.  A small crowd had assembled, mostly passersby who were interested and stopped to find out more.

The space, the BMW Guggenheim Lab, is carefully programmed each day with socially-relevant performances and presentations.  But what I liked best about the Lab is how porous it is, both literally and figuratively.  It fills an empty lot between two existing, anonymous buildings, and opens onto both Houston and First Streets.  People enter from both sides, sit down for an event, and then spill out into the park, where there’s a temporary cafe, and hang out a bit more.  In a city that’s become riddled with empty storefronts, co-opting them seems like a perfect strategy.  What if we mapped all the unoccupied spaces in New York and handed them over to artists, activists and performers?  Their work and their noise would fill the city.