The once-forgotten T-shaped plot, 2,000 square feet between Houston Street and East First Street, just east of Second Avenue, has been cleaned up and transformed by the creation of a two-story structure with a frame of black carbon fiber — commonly used to make tennis rackets but until now, the architects say, unheard of as a building material — and punctuated by a pair of hanging electronic video screens front and back. The design, by the Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow, appears deceptively simple, with an open space at street level that can comfortably accommodate about 300 people.

But the upper portion, wrapped in two layers of semitransparent black-carbon-fiber mesh, conceals everything necessary to make the space work. Specially designed modular wood bleachers, tables and pastel-painted folding chairs can be secreted away in metal containers and then raised or lowered on a rigging system. Everything, including the carbon-fiber rain gutters, was created to fold up for easy travel.

New York will be the first stop for the lab on a worldwide tour that will also include Berlin and Mumbai. There will eventually be three labs, each with its own mobile structure designed by a different architect, and each dealing with a separate theme pertaining to urban life — in the case of the lab opening on Wednesday, “Confronting Comfort.” All three will travel to cities around the world, in a project slated to last six years. In each city curators will invite leaders in fields including architecture, art, design, technology, education and science to participate in programs: lectures, workshops, games, performances and film screenings. All events will be free to the public.

The labs are the brainchild of two Guggenheim Museum curators in their early 30s, David van der Leer and Maria Nicanor, who stress that this is not some sort of ephemeral museum.