A rendering of the Lab in its future home. (Courtesy the Guggenheim)

The Guggenheim announced that the BMW Guggenheim Lab, the traveling museum that visited New York's East Village last year, will alight next in a lot in the upscale Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin.

The Lab had been scheduled to visit gallery-rich Kreuzberg, but various left-wing activists, fearing that the museum would bring gentrification and increased rents to the area, called for the project to be protested and disrupted, and the museum canceled it out of safety concerns.

The museum will reside in its new neighborhood from June 15 to July 29.

“The decision to relocate the Lab was not an easy one, but we are very pleased to have so quickly confirmed such a suitable alternative and to continue the urgent and important discussions we have begun about cities, and specifically about Berlin," Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong said in a statement.

Many German papers have condemned the protests against the Kreuzberg location. The Berliner Zeitung provides this interesting perspective translated by Der Spiegel:

"Berlin has avoided another disgrace. Canceling because the German capital couldn't ensure the safety of a Jewish foundation would have been far too embarrassing. The New York organizers say they still think Berlin is 'great.' But that can only be explained by American nonchalance, because the only thing that was 'great' in this debate of the last few weeks was the hysteria."

The BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York in 2011. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

The BMW Guggenheim Lab, the temporary structure that inhabited a lot in downtown Manhattan earlier this year, hosting public programs (and a branch of Bushwick restaurant Roberta's) will not make the next stop in a planned tour, in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood in May, according to Bloomberg.

The wire service cites a report in a German newspaper that says "left-wing" protestors had threatened to "derail" the project, arguing that it could result in "higher rents and new luxury residential developments" in the area.

In a statement released to press, the Guggenheim offered an explanation:

In response to police and local authoritiesʼ high hazard assessment, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has decided to withdraw the BMW Guggenheim Lab from the site planned in Kreuzberg, Berlin. This decision follows threats against the project. ... While we welcome vigorous debate, we cannot risk the possibility of violence, as raised by a small minority.

A representative at the Guggenheim told Gallerist that the museum is currently deciding how to proceed. The museum had been scheduled to visit nine cities during its six-year run.

With the Deutsche Guggenheim set to close at the end of the year, Berlin residents are going to be sadly Guggenheim-deprived soon.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is headed to Kreuzberg. (Dan Nguyen/Flickr)

Earlier this year, the temporary BMW Guggenheim Lab set up shop in a lot at the corner of Bowery and Houston, delighting New Yorkers with a variety of public programming, innovative and ephemeral architecture and food from Roberta's. Now it is on its way to Berlin, where it will be housed in the gallery-rich Kreuzberg neighborhood, according to the museum.

The Guggenheim had originally planned to install the Atelier Bow-Wow-designed structure in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, but said that it made the switch to a 90,400-square-foot lot in the Kreuzberg neighborhood "[f]ollowing careful consideration."

The Lab will open May 24, which is not quite soon enough to catch Berlin Gallery Weekend (runing April 27–29 this year), but certainly allows plenty of time to catch shows at galleries in Kreuzberg—among them Konrad Fischer Galerie; Arratia, Beer; Moeller Fine Art; Johann König; Buchmann Galerie; Peres Projects; and Galerie Nordenhake—before they shutter for the summer. The Lab runs through July 29.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab's stop in Berlin will be its second in a nine-city journey that will last through 2016. Following Berlin, it is set to visit Mumbai.