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BMW Welt
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COOP HIMMELB(L)AU's Wolf Prix goes into the wild beyond with the swirling forms of the BMW Welt on the outskirts of Munich.
BMW Welt (BMW World), which opened in Munich last fall, is not a building for the unreconstructed functionalist. While its bold, brazen form embraces a host of explicit functions (a delivery center for cars, exhibition space for the latest BMW designs, plus restaurants, shops, and even a business center), its architecture would horrify the Modernist problem solver. Its intentions ignore providing serviceable square footage for a given program: This is about branding.
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While branding is an overused word for a typically baggy concept, in this case it makes sense. You may not necessarily know the building’s use just by looking at it, but you do want to find out. And, furthermore, you are going to remember it. Even if the branding rationale for extravagant design may weaken due to the economy going south, not to mention worries over carbon footprints, the phenomenon has allowed architects in the past decade to unleash their imaginations on a grand scale. It’s been a wild ride.
BMW Welt’s muscular, stainless-steel-clad body, designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au, rises with the energy and force of a giant version of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Poised by the side of a highway on the edge of Munich, it is stunning: not only because it got built, but because it is so well crafted. This jawdropper is a milestone in the career of Wolf Prix, who, with Helmut Swiczinsky and Michael Holzer, founded Coop Himmelb(l)au in Vienna in 1968. (Holzer left the firm in 1971, and Swiczinsky retired in 2006.)
Despite BMW Welt’s architectural weirdness, it links an ensemble of buildings around it into an urbanistic gestalt. These include BMW’s corporate headquarters—a “four-cylinder” high-rise worthy of Bertrand Goldberg, which was designed in 1972 by Karl Schwanzer, Prix’s former professor at Vienna University of Technology. Next to the headquarters sits Schwanzer’s 1973 BMW Museum, a Niemeyeresque bowl-shaped building, now being renovated for a June opening. These structures, as well as the Olympiaturm (Olympics Tower) and the tentlike Munich Olympic Stadium that Frei Otto and Gunter Behnisch executed for the 1972 Olympics on the other side of Georg-Brauchle-Ring, form a compelling sci-fi cluster. Indeed, Prix designed his building to frame views of each of these bold, late-20th-century structures, and extended a pedestrian bridge from his building across Lerchenauerstrasse to link to the BMW campus.
Formal name of project: BMW Welt
Location: Munich, Germany
Gross square footage: 25.000 m2 sq.ft.
Total construction cost: Above 100 Million Euro
Client:
BMW AG, Munich, Germany
Architect:
COOP HIMMELB(L)AU
Wolf D. Prix/ Wolfdieter Dreibholz & Partner ZT GmbH
Spengergasse 37
1050 Wien
Austria
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Want the full story? Read the entire article in our March 2008 issue.
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