A cathedral for the god of motors

It's a meeting of architecture and automobile on the grandest scale, in which customers can pick up their new car and worship at the shrine of Germany's most powerful brand. Welcome to the phenomenon that is BMW World

Stephen Bayley
Sunday February 17, 2008
The Observer

'Die Welt ist alles', according to Wittgenstein. In saying the world is everything, the philosopher affirmed the significance of life in the face of the nullity of death. 'Is a little bit crazy, no, like a hurricane?' is what they say of BMW Welt. Here in BMW's World is its own affirmation of life. They used to say BMW stood for 'Baader Meinhof Wagen', the favoured wheels of last year's model terrorists. Now BMW represents the apogee of consumer desire.

The swaggering, vitreous, filigreed, technophiliac grandiosity of this megastructure - near Munich's spectacular 1972 Olympic Stadium, not far from Dachau, 20 minutes from the airport - is astonishing. Especially in a week when General Motors reported a $37 billion loss and the Mayor of London continued his vengeful assault on the private car with a muddled, technologically illiterate and socially divisive tax. BMW Welt has just celebrated 100 days of activity. It presents, as an architectural phantasmagoria, an entire world organised and designed to BMW's meticulous engineering standards. Scary or magnificent, depending on your perspective. At five minutes to midnight for the automobile, what does it mean?

To call BMW Welt a showroom is to betray a conceptual poverty and further to betray the poverty of language that is its handmaiden. But, in all essentials, that is what it is. German car manufacturers have a tradition of allowing customers, usually from abroad, to take delivery of their precious new vehicle at the factory. In other countries, this might be a desultory experience, but not so in Bavaria. A certain formality and pomp attends the handover ceremony because this is Germany and they take things in general, and cars in particular, very seriously.

This is what happens. A broker from New York, for example, will order his new BMW and jet to Germany to pick it up. But this is not a banal transaction. At BMW Welt he is confirmed in his good taste as a consumer by not only an architectural spectacle of the very highest quality, but also by technology exhibitions, shops, bars and restaurants. At the most exclusive of the latter he can lunch at altitude, a lead-crystal glass of high-specification Van Volxem Riesling to hand, while gazing through thrilling space at shiny new motors respectfully arranged for veneration as if religious artefacts. With BMW thoroughness, not to say mania, there is BMW-baked bread on the table and four varieties of salt on offer (with scrupulous descriptive notes: I especially enjoyed the Australian Murray River Pink Salt Flakes, rich in algae).

After lunch, and a period of smug self-congratulation, our New York broker enjoys the rehearsed ritual of the hand-over, gets into his Monaco Blue BMW 530i and vrooms off on a 14-day tour of Europe, with an itinerary (Grossglockner, Lake Garda) helpfully provided by BMW as part of its commitment to providing him with a memorable experience, from soup to lock-nuts. On his return, the car is put in a container and reverentially shipped across the Atlantic where it will be unpacked by a Jersey longshoreman probably unfamiliar with the coruscating values and unhesitating perfectionism of BMW's World.

Necessarily, a great deal of infrastructural sophistication is required to support the flawless dreamworld. So what we see above ground level is only about 40 per cent of the whole because, while there is heaven, there is an underworld too. To facilitate the handover ceremony, cars arrive the day before. As they have full tanks of petrol, regulations require that they are stored in an oxygen-reduced environment to obviate flammable risk. Underground, 285 brand new BMWs, like souls waiting to be released from Purgatory, are silently shuffled around on robotised pallets in an environment pressurised to the equivalent of 4,000m above sea level.

BMW Welt is the result of an architectural competition won in 2001 by the Austrian firm, Coop Himmelb(l)au. This name is revealing since it plays on notions of collaboration, blue-sky thinking and divine aspiration. It is one of those firms which emerged in the Eighties, put the Satan of frivolous postmodernism behind it, and reinvented modernism, making it more conceptually liberal, less tight-arsed and altogether more inventive in terms of spatial and formal invention. You could say much the same of Zaha Hadid, a runner-up in this competition. Significantly, at just the moment Coop Himmelb(l)au (which is an incongruous functional nightmare to type) was going techno-organic bonkers with this amazing building, so Chris Bangle, the American designer, was redrafting the signature look of BMW's cars, replacing visual decorum and rationality with complex curves and strange, agitated surfaces. Never forget, these are the people who gave us the word 'Zeitgeist'.

The building technology is appropriately grand. BMW Welt is supported by 775 concrete piles, each of them penetrating the earth's surface to a depth of 17 metres. The structure above ground is a geometrically boggling double cone, a design which would have been impossible to manage before computers with sophisticated three-dimensional modelling became available. There is 14,500 square metres of glass and the roof - a 'cloud hovering in space' according to Coop Himmelb(l)au's Wolf Prix - is covered with photovoltaic cells. As an architectural visitor, the experience is very nearly sublime. The enormous captive volume - exciting rather than daunting - is punctuated by aerial ramps. Prix, continuing his engagement with metaphors of height and air, said 'I want to fly', and this is what the visitor feels, transiting through this BMW-branded world, led by continuously shifting vistas. Subtle angles ease the process, and all the time, a sense of controlling intelligence coupled with superb detailing, worthy of a 7-series' cutlines, make a concept that was perhaps a little bit crazy entirely acceptable to the sober-suited board of the mighty BMW AG.

Impressive as it is architecturally, BMW Welt is even more interesting for its symbolic meaning and its significance as evidence of the status of the brand in modern thought. BMW has always been a company keenly aware of its image. It has also had associations with art that go back to its origins as a machine shop run by Karl Rapp in the days when Wassily Kandinsky was Munich's leading artistic figure, busy with the philosphical basis of abstract painting. Originally a manufacturer of aero-engines, in 1923 Rapp Motorenwerke's Max Friz produced the BMW R32 motorbike: a design of Bauhaus purity. In 1938, BMW created a department of Künstlerische Gestaltung (artistic development), the first of its type in Europe.

As a result of absolute consistency in technology, design and advertising (a commitment aided by being a family-owned business with no need to pander to short-termist investors) BMW built not just an industrial empire, but the most titanium-hard set of brand values on the planet. Its 'Neue Klasse' saloon of 1961 defined the achievements of the Wirtschaftswunder and became a symbol of the New Germany. Nine years later, BMW began work on its new HQ in Oberwiesenfeld in Milbertshofen, site of its first factory. This has become known as the Four Cylinder Building since its tectonic inspiration was a car engine. Designer of the Four Cylinder Building was Karl Schwanzer, teacher of Coop Himmelb(l)au's Wolf Prix.

Nowadays, big companies are aware of architecture's role in building their brand. A building is like an advertisement, only it lasts longer. Equally, the big international architectural practices are, themselves, becoming brands. So there is something interestingly symbiotic in BMW Welt: a joint-venture by BMW and Coop Himmelb(l)au in the creation of valuable image capital. It is said that the corporate ego of BMW met its match in the architectural ego of Professor Prix. Additionally, this emphatically industrial monument is a ravishingly conceived, spectacularly hard-edged and crisply detailed reminder that, so far as corporate architecture is concerned, the information age has produced little of interest. Google's HQ looks like a double-glazing depot. Cars may be facing extinction, but they are more gorgeous than intangible gigabytes.

So there is something triumphant and perhaps a little elegiac about BMW Welt. Maybe even Weltschmerz, that untranslatable German word for 'the sadness of things'. With their national economic commitment to the car, the Germans are perhaps a little behind the rest of us in revisionist transport policies. BMW is not alone. The Welt is just the latest in a series of vanity projects throughout Germany. Volkswagen has built Autostadt in Wolfsburg and its Glass Factory in Dresden, where car assembly is turned into a sort of industrial opera. BMW had Zaha Hadid build a factory in Leipzig. Audi has turned the centre of Ingolstadt into a celebration of itself. Both Porsche and Mercedes-Benz are building ambitious new museums. Next stage in BMW's own programme of dramatic self-mythologising is reconstructing its own museum, just opposite the Welt. It will be fully five times bigger than its predecessor.

Would we really like the rest of the world to be as well-designed as BMW Welt? There is something in the English love of amateurism that rejects its daunting perfectionism, something in English understatement uncomfortable with its bossy bravura. But then, again, you look at a superb magnesium casting on display and only a very dull person would not be moved to tears by its beauty. It was a Frenchman who said 'cars are our cathedrals', but it is BMW that has built the most exquisite shrine to the automobile.

The best of BMW: Four landmark designs

A revolution on two wheels
The BMW R32 of 1923 established the 'architecture' of BMW motorbikes for the next 70 years. Designed by Max Friz, in between aero engine projects, it was a beautifully conceived engineering diagram, a graphic of dynamic forces. A cross-section of the R32's famous twin cylinder 'boxer' engine resembles contemporary abstract pictures produced at the Bauhaus.

If it's good enough for 007...
The BMW Z3 driven by James Bond in GoldenEye looked both forward and back. It was one of the first BMWs to be designed by Chris Bangle who, over the past few years, has overseen a complete transformation in design policy. He has moved away from austere Bauhaus principles, although his inspiration was the Nazi-era BMW 328. One version of the car was copied by Jaguar to create the famous XK120.

In the 'Knick' of time
The 'Neue Klasse' saloon appeared at the Paris Salon de l'Automobile in 1961. It was BMW's first wholly modern car, a confident expression of what had been achieved in the Wirtschaftswunder. There is a purity to the details, a hierarchy in the effects that is pure Bauhaus. Designer Wilhelm Hofmeister was the author of the signature features seen here: the prominent beltline, airy glass house and the 'Hofmeisterknick', the reverse bend on the rear pillar.

We are the Welt
The X6 is BMW's latest car. It retains established BMW styling cues, as well as familiar BMW competence, but recognises new market conditions. It occupies an indefinable category between 4x4, sports coupe and saloon. In terms of vehicle architecture, it exploits the technical limits of shape-making as surely as BMW Welt itself. If the old BMW was the rectinlinear Bauhaus, the new BMW is the morphologically complex Welt.