Ugly or Art?
I say UGLEE!!
This guy is stuck on himself.
BMW Design Chief Sees Art on Wheels; Some Just See Ugly
By DANNY HAKIM
DETROIT, Nov. 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.
But now, even as BMW threatens to overtake Toyota's Lexus as the best-selling luxury brand in the United States, a 46-year-old American executive from Wisconsin is not satisfied. He is trying to make the yuppie dream car as idiosyncratic as it once was predictable. And a lot of longtime BMW lovers hate him for it.
Christopher E. Bangle, BMW's first non-German design chief, wants each BMW to be a conversation piece known as much for design as precision engineering. Where BMW's all looked very much alike, he is trying to make each model different ? some with bulging back ends, some with unusually reflective surfaces and sharp curves, and some, like the Mini, just plain small.
Why change what is already succeeding? BMW's new chief executive, Helmut Panke, is asking Mr. Bangle to help raise United States sales of BMW's almost 50 percent, to 300,000, in just a few years. And that demand comes even as many other car makers enter the luxury car market, which, they think, will be the fastest-growing part of the business in the coming decade.
Mr. Bangle's answer is to make cars that stand apart from the crowd and appeal to younger buyers' sense of individuality. "Car design got into a comfort zone in the 80's and 90's and people were terrified to break out of it," Mr. Bangle said. "BMW should be applauded for having the courage to say the future is ahead of us, guys."
But many devotees view him as an interloping artiste sullying the exalted Bimmer by trying to foist on it his version of hipness. The controversy began early this year, when the talk of the industry was the bumptious trunk lid of the 7 Series sedan, which bulges above its posterior.
"It's a very Wagnerian-looking car; that back end, you can't explain it," said Horst Reinhardt Jr., a 32-year-old mechanical engineer who lives in the Detroit suburbs and drives an older BMW but is not sure he will be able to stay with the brand. "It's just plain ugly," he said. (Sales have not been deterred though; they are up 45 percent this year.)
Others have been puzzled by the design of the company's new interior control system, iDrive, which unifies a dizzying array of functions into a single knob and has left some drivers scrambling for the manual just to start a new BMW. ("iDrive?" went a headline in Road & Track magazine. "No, you drive while I fiddle with the controller.")
BMW has also introduced a line of Mini cars, featured in the latest installment of the Austin Powers movies. And mixed feelings have sprung afresh with the recent debut of the company's Z4 roadster, which resembles a metallic shark with a highly reflective surface and unusual lines. "Just plain goofy looking," is how one reviewer, in Automobile magazine, describes it.
Some BMW fans, who have long viewed their cars as unassailable temples, fear worse could be ahead. One of BMW's most controversial recent prototypes was even off-kilter, with a back end that looked like it sprang from a Cubist paintbrush.
"There's not one human being on this planet that symmetrical," Mr. Bangle said. "So why do we demand it of an emotional product?"
One of a coterie of designers trained at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., in the 1970's who have gone on to leading industry roles, Mr. Bangle exudes confidence. He hails from Wausau, Wis., a town founded by logging barons. The name is an Indian word for "faraway place." Insurance is now the town's biggest industry, hunting and fishing are favorite hobbies and the Green Bay Packers are a religion. If Mr. Bangle still pronounces "roots" like "puts," in the Midwestern style, he has become somewhat Continental after marrying a Swiss woman and spending the last 21 years working for carmakers in Europe (the last decade for BMW).
Queried about his rank, he asked an American handler: "I'm not a V.P., am I? I have no idea what I am in English." He sometimes slipped into German as he talked to an American reporter.
Mr. Bangle has much of the deep-thinking artistic soul in him. He is supremely intense. At a dinner at the Detroit Institute of Arts ? sitting under an imposing Diego Rivera mural depicting the auto industry of the 1930's ? he briefly grew teary when describing the frustrations of a profession that has him telling his artists, all at various points, that projects of years in duration will never see the light of day. Such is the car business.
Mr. Bangle often speaks in language that floats beyond pedestrian conversation and can leave one a little puzzled. For instance, he calls the Z4 a car that "truly separates itself far apart visually from the predecessors of the last century." How? To the untrained eye, it might look like just a flashy new roadster. But Mr. Bangle said it was a leap beyond other cars the way sculpture changed when classical sculptors discovered the power of draping cloth on nude forms and infusing them with motion.
"That nude, now with the revealing and energizing aspect of a tissue of cloth, is the Z4," he said. "To me that's as big a jump in terms of aesthetic value systems as there was between an Eve before the fall, where she was innocent and pure, and the sexiness that she had was an animalistic pureness that radiated out of her, and an Eve after the fall who discovered and was aware of the surface of her body, could use clothes and the drapery of form, a slit here an opening there, to bring a new kind of erotic sensuality. Same woman, two different aspects."
When Mr. Bangle joined the Munich-based BMW in 1992, the company had not even had a chief designer for several years. He has spent the last decade elevating his own role, and the role of design, to the point where he has the influence to play a major role in the transformation of the company's image.
His hypercerebral approach to car design was apparent during an hourlong interview, in which he mentioned Archimedes, Vermeer, Pythagoras, Euclid and the British art historian Kenneth Clark.
Criticism? He is not shy in shrugging it off.
"I've often told people that the 7 Series, to me, is the first car of the century, in all of its contents and technical aspects and certainly in its presence," he said. "This car is miles apart from anything that came before."
Not everyone can appreciate that. Even some dealers concede the car is not sold from the rear.
"No one falls in love with the trunk," said Greg Dickson, general sales manager at Nick Alexander Imports in Los Angeles.
He added: "Some people say it's ugly. I say, come on, sit in this car for five minutes. You can't see the trunk from the driver's seat."
The criticism has hardly hurt sales of the 7 Series ? BMW's most expensive line, starting at about $70,000 ? which have increased 45 percent this year. One fan is Chris Cedergren, co-founder of a California firm that does market research for the auto industry.
"It moves away from everyone else and differentiates the brand," he said. "It makes a statement. The more you can get the consumer to be one with that vehicle and really link their emotion to that vehicle, that will translate into a situation where the consumer will say, `I want it.' "
"What Chris Bangle is doing is reading that into the marketplace, and, rightly so, developing vehicles that go after individual emotions," he added.
BMW had 11.4 percent of the luxury car market in the United States during the first 10 months of the year, second only to Lexus, which had 11.6 percent. BMW's share has doubled in a decade as domestic brands like Cadillac and Lincoln have plummeted, according to data compiled by Sanford C. Bernstein and Ward's AutoInfoBank. BMW sales generally are up an impressive 17 percent this year, but all is not rosy in Wall Street's eyes.
"The problem," said Scott Hill, auto analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, "is every single mainline vehicle manufacturer is now trying to take their product line upscale."
Mr. Hill thinks the trend is already putting pressure on the company's profit margins and will give BMW less flexibility to raise prices. He also says Lexus will have an advantage in an increasingly competitive environment because of Toyota's greater manufacturing efficiencies.
Mr. Bangle is confident. But speculation has already begun on whether he will continue to push the design envelope or pull back.
Just don't call his cars automobiles.
"We don't make automobiles, which are utilitarian machines you use to get from Point A to Point B," Mr. Bangle once wrote. "We make cars, moving works of art."
I say UGLEE!!
This guy is stuck on himself.
BMW Design Chief Sees Art on Wheels; Some Just See Ugly
By DANNY HAKIM
DETROIT, Nov. 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.
But now, even as BMW threatens to overtake Toyota's Lexus as the best-selling luxury brand in the United States, a 46-year-old American executive from Wisconsin is not satisfied. He is trying to make the yuppie dream car as idiosyncratic as it once was predictable. And a lot of longtime BMW lovers hate him for it.
Christopher E. Bangle, BMW's first non-German design chief, wants each BMW to be a conversation piece known as much for design as precision engineering. Where BMW's all looked very much alike, he is trying to make each model different ? some with bulging back ends, some with unusually reflective surfaces and sharp curves, and some, like the Mini, just plain small.
Why change what is already succeeding? BMW's new chief executive, Helmut Panke, is asking Mr. Bangle to help raise United States sales of BMW's almost 50 percent, to 300,000, in just a few years. And that demand comes even as many other car makers enter the luxury car market, which, they think, will be the fastest-growing part of the business in the coming decade.
Mr. Bangle's answer is to make cars that stand apart from the crowd and appeal to younger buyers' sense of individuality. "Car design got into a comfort zone in the 80's and 90's and people were terrified to break out of it," Mr. Bangle said. "BMW should be applauded for having the courage to say the future is ahead of us, guys."
But many devotees view him as an interloping artiste sullying the exalted Bimmer by trying to foist on it his version of hipness. The controversy began early this year, when the talk of the industry was the bumptious trunk lid of the 7 Series sedan, which bulges above its posterior.
"It's a very Wagnerian-looking car; that back end, you can't explain it," said Horst Reinhardt Jr., a 32-year-old mechanical engineer who lives in the Detroit suburbs and drives an older BMW but is not sure he will be able to stay with the brand. "It's just plain ugly," he said. (Sales have not been deterred though; they are up 45 percent this year.)
Others have been puzzled by the design of the company's new interior control system, iDrive, which unifies a dizzying array of functions into a single knob and has left some drivers scrambling for the manual just to start a new BMW. ("iDrive?" went a headline in Road & Track magazine. "No, you drive while I fiddle with the controller.")
BMW has also introduced a line of Mini cars, featured in the latest installment of the Austin Powers movies. And mixed feelings have sprung afresh with the recent debut of the company's Z4 roadster, which resembles a metallic shark with a highly reflective surface and unusual lines. "Just plain goofy looking," is how one reviewer, in Automobile magazine, describes it.
Some BMW fans, who have long viewed their cars as unassailable temples, fear worse could be ahead. One of BMW's most controversial recent prototypes was even off-kilter, with a back end that looked like it sprang from a Cubist paintbrush.
"There's not one human being on this planet that symmetrical," Mr. Bangle said. "So why do we demand it of an emotional product?"
One of a coterie of designers trained at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., in the 1970's who have gone on to leading industry roles, Mr. Bangle exudes confidence. He hails from Wausau, Wis., a town founded by logging barons. The name is an Indian word for "faraway place." Insurance is now the town's biggest industry, hunting and fishing are favorite hobbies and the Green Bay Packers are a religion. If Mr. Bangle still pronounces "roots" like "puts," in the Midwestern style, he has become somewhat Continental after marrying a Swiss woman and spending the last 21 years working for carmakers in Europe (the last decade for BMW).
Queried about his rank, he asked an American handler: "I'm not a V.P., am I? I have no idea what I am in English." He sometimes slipped into German as he talked to an American reporter.
Mr. Bangle has much of the deep-thinking artistic soul in him. He is supremely intense. At a dinner at the Detroit Institute of Arts ? sitting under an imposing Diego Rivera mural depicting the auto industry of the 1930's ? he briefly grew teary when describing the frustrations of a profession that has him telling his artists, all at various points, that projects of years in duration will never see the light of day. Such is the car business.
Mr. Bangle often speaks in language that floats beyond pedestrian conversation and can leave one a little puzzled. For instance, he calls the Z4 a car that "truly separates itself far apart visually from the predecessors of the last century." How? To the untrained eye, it might look like just a flashy new roadster. But Mr. Bangle said it was a leap beyond other cars the way sculpture changed when classical sculptors discovered the power of draping cloth on nude forms and infusing them with motion.
"That nude, now with the revealing and energizing aspect of a tissue of cloth, is the Z4," he said. "To me that's as big a jump in terms of aesthetic value systems as there was between an Eve before the fall, where she was innocent and pure, and the sexiness that she had was an animalistic pureness that radiated out of her, and an Eve after the fall who discovered and was aware of the surface of her body, could use clothes and the drapery of form, a slit here an opening there, to bring a new kind of erotic sensuality. Same woman, two different aspects."
When Mr. Bangle joined the Munich-based BMW in 1992, the company had not even had a chief designer for several years. He has spent the last decade elevating his own role, and the role of design, to the point where he has the influence to play a major role in the transformation of the company's image.
His hypercerebral approach to car design was apparent during an hourlong interview, in which he mentioned Archimedes, Vermeer, Pythagoras, Euclid and the British art historian Kenneth Clark.
Criticism? He is not shy in shrugging it off.
"I've often told people that the 7 Series, to me, is the first car of the century, in all of its contents and technical aspects and certainly in its presence," he said. "This car is miles apart from anything that came before."
Not everyone can appreciate that. Even some dealers concede the car is not sold from the rear.
"No one falls in love with the trunk," said Greg Dickson, general sales manager at Nick Alexander Imports in Los Angeles.
He added: "Some people say it's ugly. I say, come on, sit in this car for five minutes. You can't see the trunk from the driver's seat."
The criticism has hardly hurt sales of the 7 Series ? BMW's most expensive line, starting at about $70,000 ? which have increased 45 percent this year. One fan is Chris Cedergren, co-founder of a California firm that does market research for the auto industry.
"It moves away from everyone else and differentiates the brand," he said. "It makes a statement. The more you can get the consumer to be one with that vehicle and really link their emotion to that vehicle, that will translate into a situation where the consumer will say, `I want it.' "
"What Chris Bangle is doing is reading that into the marketplace, and, rightly so, developing vehicles that go after individual emotions," he added.
BMW had 11.4 percent of the luxury car market in the United States during the first 10 months of the year, second only to Lexus, which had 11.6 percent. BMW's share has doubled in a decade as domestic brands like Cadillac and Lincoln have plummeted, according to data compiled by Sanford C. Bernstein and Ward's AutoInfoBank. BMW sales generally are up an impressive 17 percent this year, but all is not rosy in Wall Street's eyes.
"The problem," said Scott Hill, auto analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, "is every single mainline vehicle manufacturer is now trying to take their product line upscale."
Mr. Hill thinks the trend is already putting pressure on the company's profit margins and will give BMW less flexibility to raise prices. He also says Lexus will have an advantage in an increasingly competitive environment because of Toyota's greater manufacturing efficiencies.
Mr. Bangle is confident. But speculation has already begun on whether he will continue to push the design envelope or pull back.
Just don't call his cars automobiles.
"We don't make automobiles, which are utilitarian machines you use to get from Point A to Point B," Mr. Bangle once wrote. "We make cars, moving works of art."
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