Interview mit Chris Bangle
January 21, 2003
Chris Bangle, Head of BMW Global Design
BMW Design Chief Sees Art on Wheels; Some Just See Ugly
By DANNY HAKIM
MUNICH, Jan. 20 — Since the 1960's, BMW has pried open the wallets of the affluent by producing handsome, conservative cars known for handling, performance, luxury and, most of all, status. And now, at the height of its success, when many of its rivals are hunkering down, BMW is making risky bets and unveiling a collection of bold new models. Who says you shouldn't mess with success?
The room is called, appropriately enough, the Penthouse. It takes up about 14,000 square meters atop the Forschungs- und Innovationszentrum, better known as the FIZ, BMW's sprawling, glass-and-steel R&D center in Munich, Germany. The Penthouse stands empty, save for a lone vehicle cloaked in silver canvas. Parked on the west side of the room, the vehicle is backed by floor-to-ceiling windows that reveal a great dome of sky filled with roiling thunderheads. Standing next to the vehicle is a 46-year-old native of Wausau, Wisconsin named Christopher E. Bangle.
Blond, blue-eyed, and bearded, Bangle is carefully assembled in a gray pin-striped suit, a blue-and-white-striped shirt, and a tie bearing a jazzy geometric pattern. He has a hardwired intensity about him, and his words take on an even greater urgency as he lifts a corner of the canvas and begins to assist in what can only be described as a striptease.
Bangle reveals first the wheels of the concept vehicle, then its flanks, and on up to the hood, all the while acting as a kind of master of ceremonies in overdrive: "We call this 'flame design' . . . the splines hold the tension . . . these are surfaces that move; it's 'ooh, here we go' . . . proportion, surface, and detail all convey emotion, and yet they are all under control . . . control, control, control – it's the most important thing." But then he stops. It turns out that this is a bit of a strip but more of a tease, for Bangle resists baring the entire car, BMW's 2004 X-Life trailer concept. There will be no full-frontal display of the X-Life before it makes its official debut at the Paris auto show in late September. At the push of a button, the X-Life takes a slow turn on a revolving platform. "This is it!" Bangle exclaims. "An absolutely cutting-edge concept vehicle, full of mega-emotion."
Bangle is amped about the X-Life – as well he should be. He oversaw the team that designed it. As BMW's chief of design, Bangle leads all 250 of the German carmaker's design engineers and artists, color experts, ergonomic specialists, materials scientists, clay modelers, and computer wizards, all of whom work in the FIZ and in the company's Designworks/USA subsidiary, located in southern California. Ultimately, he is the point man for the look and feel of every product that bears BMW's distinctive blue-and-white roundel, as well as the Mini brand and, as of this year, the ultra-luxury Rolls-Royce.
Every model launch at every car company represents a big bet, and the X-Life is no exception: It took a minimum of $1 billion to design and engineer the concept vehicle and ready it for production. But there's far more at stake here than return on investment. The X-Life is BMW's radical follow-up to last year’s January launch of its redesigned flagship, the 7 Series luxury sedan, which is arguably the most controversial model that the German carmaker has ever put before the public. Taken together, the X-Life and the 7 are at the forefront of a make-or-break attempt by BMW to reinvent its entire spectrum of cars. Such a gamble arrives at a perilous moment in Bayerische Motoren Werke AG's 86-year history: The company is coming off of a record-breaking year. And as anyone in the car business will tell you, nothing is tougher than surpassing past success.
It's just around midnight, and Bangle is lingering over a Weiss beer in a trendy Munich restaurant. He is thinking about Stephen Jay Gould, the renowned author and paleontologist who died last May. Or rather, he is thinking about Gould's controversial theory known as punctuated equilibrium, which argues that evolution proceeds slowly, but not always steadily; it is sometimes interrupted by sudden, rapid change. Bangle believes that cars evolve in a similar fashion. And he is convinced that BMWs are entering a period of abrupt, accelerated change in their own evolution: “It’s time to make the big jump!”
Hakim: That is, the new X-Life concept …
Bangle: … is going to push the boundaries as far as possible. Making only incremental changes, you find yourself in a corridor that gets narrower and narrower. Finally, you reach a dead end, and by then, the customer has abandoned you for something that's fresh and new. We had to break through that corridor. You can't be a leader if you're not out in front.
Hakim: However, isn’t the X-Life concept opposed to the motoring spirit you succeeded to establish with recent Mini Cooper ads ("When you drive, you go from A to B. When you motor, you go from A to Z. . . . Nobody can tell you when you're motoring. You just know.")?
Bangle: I think you’re confusing two totally different approaches here. The X-Life is going to challenge the complete way of habiting by widening perceptions of mobility.
Hakim: Less well disposed contemporaries call the X-Life an expensive trailer, let alone the rigidness of an ancient vehicle concept.
Bangle: The X-Life is everything but an ordinary premium mobile home. That concept vehicle is miles apart from anything that came before. What we were trying at BMW was to abandon traditional theories about how trailer parks, how living space in general, can be organized. You might take our X-Life vehicle as a rigid base, docking different other vehicles. Perfect. We named that the “hangar / fighter jet”, or less military: “houseboat / scooter” approach. But you also could like to take the X-Life as a portable and what is most important combinable habitation assembly. That is what we named the “high-street nomad or Situationist” practise. Imagine living together in a close-knit community at Knightsbridge, maybe doing business; then departing to a secret spot in Sweden, spending the summer months in complete isolation, to meet again in Nice, interconnecting your X-Lives again …
Hakim: How did you provoke what you describe as abandoning consuetudinary theories?
Bangle: My first step was to push my designers to take risks – and to be prepared to defend the results. People tend to work backward into their comfort zones, and they have to be prodded out of them. Leaders dare to take you to where you don't want to go, and that's absolutely true for a design department. I also set out to build what I call a dutzen culture: an open, informal place where people aren't afraid to say what they really think … My role in the process has mainly been about team-building.
Hakim: So then according to which parameters did you select your team?
Bangle: The key here is diversity. If our people all thought the same way and didn’t argue, we wouldn't have a design or communication culture; we'd just have mass opinion. Internal competition, in other words not voting on issues, is a fundamental premise of this organization. The dynamic exchange of viewpoints combined with every participant’s ability of leaving restricting profession routines, enables us to generate new viewpoints on formulations of a problem, a different exposure to certain proceedings; or helps us even to create formulations of a problem to come.
Hakim: That doesn’t exactly sound like top-profit conduct to me.
Bangle: Foremost, it’s not a result-oriented, however very precise, conduct. What we actually do is we’re trying to keep the process of research in motion until we’re reaching a stage that provides us with an atmosphere, where you could easily pull out immensely powerful products. What I’m trying to say is that we’re - at any given time - capable of deciding when to shut down research and start extracting top-selling products.
Hakim: The X-Life assembly as the first artefact arising from this modus operandi?
Bangle: Maybe the second. The first time we proceeded similarly was when we had to come up with a radical successor to the X5 sport-utility vehicle, which was being readied for production in Spartanburg, South Carolina. That time, I carved out a seven-figure budget and sent a team to work in the United States at a secret location of its own choosing. “Deep Blue's” members were cut free of the FIZ and allowed to relocate so that they could work far from prying eyes – including, my own eyes. The team leased Elizabeth Taylor's former home in Malibu, California. After six months of grueling work, of colliding views, they had produced six product statements for what would eventually become the X3 SUV.
Hakim: Rumor has it, that you also worked together with well-known externals: architects like Daniel Liebeskind or Norman Foster.
Bangle: We asked Daniel Liebeskind to chip in his “deconstructivist” town planning perception. Cut short that’s about keeping several vacant sites in a city to respect changes or improvements in architecture and not to fill up urban sides in a single period of time. That’s a theory going perfectly together with our visions of mobile, shifting “X-Life” architecture. We planned X-Life sites in several cities around the globe, thought about how to interweave them with existing urban structure and so on. We assigned Sir Norman Foster to join us in developing methods and details of interfaces to connect different X-Lives.
Hakim: While you’re saying your X-Life movement improves city life, you could also put it the other way round, saying an X-Life site is a risky, incalculable factor for city majors.
Bangle: It’s surely going to challenge ancient town planning theories. But it’s definitely not going to tear them down. X-Living is not a mass movement. Yet. (laughs). I see lots of positive aspects: cities might balance differences in employment rates with people not afraid of moving on to where there are new challenges for them. Again: high-street, up-to-date nomadism.