German Car Zone

shonguiz · 10-04-2007, 02:39 PM

Mercedes, BMW and (soon) Porsche have amazing buildings, what about VAG ?

siko · 10-04-2007, 02:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shonguiz

Mercedes, BMW and (soon) Porsche have amazing buildings, what about VAG ?

Volkswagen has their glass factory... which is pretty cool too:

FC123 · 10-04-2007, 03:15 PM

I would so wish, my own company was big enough that people would take kindly to not only buy my products, but pay a premium, so I allow them to pick up the product at my place effectively saving me my shipping cost...

Oh well in 20 years perhaps...

Nice building though.

S'Pimp · 10-04-2007, 03:28 PM

Yeah!
Transparent Factory in Dresden to produce the Phaeton

and Autostadt in Wolfsburg to deliver VAG -cars

The Artist · 10-04-2007, 10:04 PM

BMW does not even know how to deliver a car..
Cause BMW is a CAr

..haha

sorry i just had to

Beemer B773ER · 10-04-2007, 10:23 PM

Apart from the German marques, are there are other car companies who put such effort, focus and passion into their buildings and factories?

..and what are the benefits of putting a lot of money to such buildings? Is it really worth it? .. or is it more of a 'trying to out-do' battle between the Germans (much like their horsepower battle)?

shonguiz · 10-05-2007, 07:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Beemer B773ER

Apart from the German marques, are there are other car companies who put such effort, focus and passion into their buildings and factories?

..and what are the benefits of putting a lot of money to such buildings? Is it really worth it? .. or is it more of a 'trying to out-do' battle between the Germans (much like their horsepower battle)?

Long time before the germans, Fiat has built the Lingotto Factory wich was considered as a modernist masterpiece.

The amazing thing with that building is that it has a race course on the roof.

DaSilva · 10-05-2007, 07:45 AM

I just love the whole car industry... !
Look at these buildings.

Thanks for posting!

shonguiz · 10-05-2007, 08:00 AM

Car-chitecture: New Museums Enshrine the Brand

Auto Showplaces Market Status, Style;
On Stage at BMW World

By HELEN CHANG

Quote:

MUNICH -- Visitors to the new BMW World in Munich would be forgiven for thinking they were entering a new concert hall, museum, or even a cathedral. The soaring steel-and-glass building seeks to capture just the same exalted emotions, but in this case for a more mundane task: selling cars.

More than a hundred times a day BMW plans to put on an intricately choreographed show for car buyers and voyeurs alike. It will go something like this: As onlookers watch from a walkway above, a customer descends onto a stage to await his car, which rises from a lower level on a spotlit, rotating platform. It stops, and the buyer climbs in and drives out of the building down a curving track specially coated to prevent tire-squealing, with enough gas to get to the autobahn.

This 73,000-square-meter shrine to BMW, which opens Oct. 21, was designed by Viennese architects Coop Himmelb(l)au, its swooping roof and twisted-glass tower an aerodynamic testament to BMW's early-20th-century origins as an aircraft-engine maker. "We wanted to show the emotional side of the brand," says Helmut Pöschl, BMW Welt spokesman.

The building, a "car delivery and experience center," as BMW calls it, is the latest in a string of architecturally significant car showroom-museums built by German makers. They serve as elaborate marketing tools, showcasing the style, status and history of the luxury brands. As competition has heated up in Germany since the 1990s, with foreign luxury-car makers gaining a foothold, the German makers are turning more than ever to building the perception of their brands as an elite design experience.

Quote:

The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, built in 2006, is a matte-aluminum spiral seemingly perched on the shoulder of the autobahn. Inside, visitors are channeled through display spaces -- labeled "myth" and "collection" -- winding around a central atrium. Its educational exhibits are balanced with gorgeous models from history, from one of the world's first modern cars -- a 1902 black and gold-rimmed Mercedes-Simplex, its steering wheel perched on a slender stem -- to the sexy 1962 300 SL Roadster convertible, to a replica of the "Team Germany" bus that ferried the football team to its 1974 World Cup championship.

Architect Caroline Bos, of Amsterdam's UNStudio, said the firm visited car shows to learn about architecture that "awakens the desire to buy." So the glossy cars, for example, are set off by an austere, nonreflecting background of matte concrete.

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The Porsche Museum, designed by Viennese architects Delugan Meissl and scheduled to open next year on the other side of Stuttgart, will be a white trapezoidal building, clad in a soft rubber skin, that appears to hover above ground. About 80 models at a time, including versions of the 911 from 1963 until today, will be displayed.

Quote:

BMW isn't new to the "starchitect" game; Zaha Hadid designed the central building of its BMW Werk factory in Leipzig, finished in 2005. The corrugated-steel and glass structure serves as a connecting hub between production areas -- the silver skeletons of the new BMW 1-Series move quietly on tracks above the work spaces for engineers and mechanics. "When something goes wrong in the factory, you can see it immediately," says Michael Janssen, the factory spokesman. The standard factory tour has been supplemented with an additional architecture tour.

BMW puts the price of their new project, BMW World, at "more than €100 million," but the structural engineers on the project, Frankfurt-based Bollinger and Grohmann, say the figure is about €250 million.

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The phenomenon is not only German. In Britain the Rolls Royce factory in Goodwood, built by Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners in 2003, is half-submerged with a sedum-covered roof that makes the plant almost invisible from the air.

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The 2003 Norman Foster-designed McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, which makes Formula One racers as well as the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren luxury cars, is a curvaceous, low-slung plant swooping around man-made lakes used for cooling.

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In Turin, the Lingotto, the Modernist masterpiece built by Giacomo Mattè Trucco from 1914 to 1926, was Fiat's factory until 1983 -- complete with a race course on the roof. The interior was redesigned as an exhibition hall, conference center and hotel by Renzo Piano in 1989.

Quote:

But the trendsetter who recognized the marketing value of spectacular architecture is Volkswagen, with Autostadt -- car city -- a 25-hectare complex in Wolfsburg that combines car factory, pick-up center, historical museum and theme park, complete with its own jazz and blues festival. The seven-year-old site attracts two million visitors a year, making it the second-most-visited attraction in Germany -- after the Europa-Park theme park near Freiburg.

About a third of the visitors to Autostadt go to pick up a car; the rest are there for the experience. The enjoyment of car culture is especially profound in Germany, and it starts early. On a recent day at Autostadt school groups and kids with families happily cut car shapes out of plasticine with a milling machine and learned about biofuels.

Quote:

Among the older generation, the preference for German cars and quality remains deeply rooted. "Everybody knows that the Lexus has a perfect engine, that its mother company Toyota is a good brand, but cars are a deep German thing," says auto analyst Peter Brietsche of GfK Market Research Group in Nuremberg. "If you buy a Hyundai, the neighbors will ask, 'Hmmm, Peter, what's going on? Is there something going on in your family?' Then you must fight for your car -- you must explain, and the average German will not want to explain."

At BMW World, the company's Bavarian origins resonate. It is part of a factory complex that includes the landmark "Four Cylinders" headquarters building, designed by Austrian architect Karl Schwanzer in 1972, as well as the popular bowl-shaped BMW Museum. Now under renovation and scheduled to reopen next year, it will show more BMW cars and motorcycles from history.

The first BMW engines, built for military aircraft during World War I, were tested here in 1917. The company began producing motorcycles in 1923, and automobiles in 1928. After World War II and the recovery from the near-destruction of its Munich factory, the company, whose motto is "sheer driving pleasure," grew into one of the world's dominant luxury-car makers.

About 200,000 people a year visit the complex, but BMW is expecting that to quadruple with the new building, with about 45,000 visitors taking home a car.

Picking up a car directly from the factory has historically been a money-saving option for German car-buyers, to eliminate the delivery cost. Mercedes-Benz has offered pick-up at their Sindelfingen factory since 1953. In 2000, Volkswagen began offering a factory tour and a free night in a Ritz-Carlton hotel to car buyers picking up their purchase at Autostadt. They also get a commemorative photograph of themselves with the new car. "It's like picking up a baby," says Nicholas Batten, VW Autostadt spokesman.

To receive their car at BMW Welt, customers will pay extra -- a fee of €475. It will be "the more emotional people, the ones who spend hours deciding on this color or that detail," says the spokesman Mr. Pöschl.

The delivery choreography begins on the third floor, in a private lounge with a view over the stage. When the airport-like screens announce it's your turn, you are shown to the orientation room, a darkened space where multimedia stations with touch screens display and illustrate the categories of design, performance, security, service and driving dynamics. Nearby are training cabins, outfitted with a test steering wheel, floor pedals and a video to guide you through the controls of your new car. Next, you're taken up to the top floor by elevator so you can dramatically descend three flights by a grand staircase -- the staff call it the "Hollywood" stairs -- to the stage, where your car spins slowly, having just emerged from the high-tech underground storage space.

The show should be entertaining even for visitors who aren't taking a car home. There are also exhibits on technology (current show: energy efficiency and aerodynamics, presented with "emotional lighting," BMW says), a modern theater, shops and restaurants.

What makes BMW World notable outside the realm of cars is its architecture, which is stunning. A whirlpool-shaped entry of glass and steel acts as a mooring mast for the undulating, floating roof. Inside, vast spaces -- in some sections 24 meters high -- are filled with light, and with elegant, monochrome details, such as the glowing, cobalt blue elevator buttons. "The architecture of a neutral box is obsolete," says the building's architect, Wolf D. Prix. "Our architecture doesn't wear a pullover. It is like a kind of skin, an osmotic layer which either filters out things or lets them through."

The glass curtain offers views across the street to Olympic Park, built for the 1972 Summer Games and now a sports and theater center, with its revolutionary suspended tent-like roof designed by German architect Frei Otto. From outside, motorists on the four-lane freeways crisscrossing the area see their reflection in the building's side as they zoom by.

Source:Car-chitecture: New Museums Enshrine the Brand - WSJ.com

PanterroR · 10-05-2007, 08:02 AM

Karma for the post, man.

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