My Life and Times

Roland Halbe

An office? A factory? Or an elevated freeway?
May 22, 2005
At BMW, the Auto Assembly Line Meets High Design
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Leipzig, Germany

OF all of Modernism's sacred cows, few have been more revered - or abused - than the assembly line. At the height of the Modernist movement, the crisp, functional efficiency of this factory staple was a template for everything from housing projects to utopian visions of the metropolis.

The new central building at the BMW plant here, designed by the London architect Zaha Hadid, is an antidote to just that sort of mind-numbing, machine-age uniformity. A vast, boomerang-shaped industrial shed with rows of cars streaming by in midair on curving tracks, it is less a model of efficiency than a finely oiled machine for voyeuristic pleasure.

In recent years, German automakers have seized on high-profile architecture as a way of bolstering their images. Coop Himmelb(l)au, based in Vienna, is designing a futuristic blend of showrooms, restaurants and shops for a BMW delivery center in Munich; in Stuttgart, the Amsterdam firm UN Studio has designed the Mercedes-Benz Museum, whose interweaving ramps echo the spiral of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim in Manhattan. Both are scheduled for completion next spring.

Yet beyond the obvious marketing value, the Leipzig assembly plant is a sophisticated attempt at social engineering. By creating a fluid work environment in which management, engineers, autoworkers and cars seem intertwined, Ms. Hadid is seeking to break down the hierarchies that have defined the traditional factory. In this world, information flows freely and man and machine live in blissful harmony. And while the sight of glistening black and silver coupes gliding through the air may seem a sci-fi horror to some, it is sure to enchant car fanatics.

In many ways, the plant's site on the city's outskirts harks back to old-style Modernism. Even before Ms. Hadid was hired, a team of bulldozers was leveling the area, once farmland, to make room for a vast factory complex - an approach more in keeping with the tabula rasa planning of the postwar years than with the eco-friendly approaches of today.

The three main factory buildings - body shop, paint shop and assembly plant - are housed in big prefabricated corrugated metal sheds, generic staples of the industrial landscape. But Ms. Hadid subverts the sequential order of the manufacturing process by having each car loop back through her central building, where autoworkers and engineers can survey their work and, when needed, reconfigure the assembly process.

This is ideal territory for this architect. Ever since her student days in the 1970's at the Architectural Association in London, she has been drawn to the vast scale of infrastructure: industrial dams, ribbons of highways, gargantuan urban high-rises. In her 1983 proposal for the Peak, an unbuilt country club in Hong Kong that made her an instant cult figure in architectural circles, buildings resembling big concrete beams looked as if they were about to splinter off into space.

Here, all of that feverish energy has been packed inside. Like the surrounding factory buildings, the central structure is wrapped in a taut corrugated-metal skin, but with the corners slightly curved to give it a sleek, contoured look. A bridgelike office structure splits off from the central building and joins two of the factory sheds, framing a small entry courtyard. Supported on massive concrete columns shaped like fins, the office area is engineered like a segment of elevated freeway.

But the most dynamic structure here has yet to be built: a low, sloping showroom that will one day be the entrance point for the complex. Arriving from the Autobahn, visitors will slow down to turn past the showroom, then hurtle across a sprawling parking lot set diagonally to the main building. Once they park, they must slip under the office bridge to reach the main entrance, as if they were ricocheting between the buildings.

Inside the central building, the first thing that strikes you is the immense scale. Offices are organized as a series of concrete terraces that seem to cascade from one end. A towering stairway sweeps up to a balcony of offices along one side of the room; on the other side, the terraces are linked by a long, narrow ramp.

Evoking the silent spacecraft of Stanley Kubrick's "2001," rows of car bodies stream by on computerized tracks. Because every car is routed through here on its way from the body shop to the paint shop or final assembly plant, you witness them in all their various stages. At certain points, the cars stop and revolve on enormous turntables before heading off in a new direction.

The movements are hypnotic, suggesting a mechanical ballet. During shift changes, the sight of hundreds of autoworkers flowing through the corridors adds to the sense of choreography.

In traditional automobile plants, of course, car assembly was organized in a linear sequence, with rows of workers and machinery methodically assembling the cars on a factory line, while engineers tinkered away in offices somewhere across town. Together they churned out an endlessly repetitive sequence of cars, one much like the other.

Today, a luxury car company like BMW will produce thousands of highly customized cars each week, a process that demands lots of tinkering and intervention. When a new step needs to be added to production, the line can be adjusted with minimal interruption.

By channeling all of the work through the central building, Ms. Hadid creates a seamless environment, smoothing that process. The terraces create a kind of loose-knit social hierarchy, breaking down the staff into discrete tiers while allowing engineers to observe or consult with one another without having to pick up a phone. Engineers and workers are in constant contact, too, mingling in the corridors and the cafeteria.

Yet the overarching agenda is to keep the eye focused on the machines, with everyone involved in a constant process of fine-tuning. From their office terraces, engineers can step out onto glass-enclosed viewing platforms to watch the huge, swiveling robotic arms that weld the car frames together. Here and there, cars are periodically pulled off the line and examined for defects. And the mechanized tracks converge above the upper-level cafeteria, so that even workers on lunch break are constantly aware of their presence.

Ms. Hadid is not the first to approach the automobile plant as part of a broader social experiment. Henry Ford is said to have monitored his assembly line with a stopwatch, seeking to foster worker productivity. Nor is she the first to imbue a factory with sex appeal. In the 1920's in Turin, Italy, Giacomo Matt?-Trucco famously topped the Lingotto Fiat factory with a dynamic rooftop test track. The track summed up the Futurists' obsession with speed, their dream of a society in a state of perpetual motion.

Today, such experiments inevitably evoke the dark side of machine worship: the link between Futurism and fascism, for example, and their tendency to reduce human beings to interchangeable parts in a vast, grinding machine.

Ms. Hadid is sensitive to these issues. Visually, her early work has all the dynamic energy of a Futurist painting by Boccioni or Balla, but its forms also reflect a desire to reverse Modernism's dehumanizing effects. The patterns of movement in her architecture are about freedom rather than rigid order.

Here Ms. Hadid takes on this Modernist past directly and gives it a new twist. The free flow of information replaces the monotony of the assembly line; individual needs and tastes rule over bland repetition; and machines are at the service of man, not vice versa. It's unclear where this vision will lead us, but for now, it's pretty seductive.

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