BMW Central Building

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At BMW, the Auto Assembly Line Meets High Design

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...
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The Central Building is the active nerve-centre or brain of the whole factory complex. All threads of the building’s activities gather together and branch out again from here.
This planning strategy applies to the cycles and trajectories of people - workers and visitors - as well as for the cycle and progress of the production line which traverses this central point - departing and returning again.

This dynamic focal point of the enterprise is made visually evident in the proposed dynamic spatial system that encompasses the whole northern front of the factory and articulates the central building as the point of confluence and culmination of the various converging flows. It seems as if the whole of the expanse on this side of the factory is oriented and animated by a force field emanating from the central building. All movement converging on the site is funnelled through this compression chamber squeezed in-between the three main segments of production: Body in White, Paint Shop and Assembly.

The organization of the building exploits the obvious sequence of front to back for the phasing of public/busy to more withdrawn/quiet activities. The facade envelope is pulled in under a large diagonally projecting top floor. Here the car drop-off swoops underneath letting off visitors into the glazed public lobby.

The primary organizing strategy is the scissor-section that connects ground floor and first floor into a continuos field.
two sequences of terraced plates - like giant staircases - step up from north to south and from south to north. One commences close to the public lobby passing by/overlooking the forum to reach the first floor in the middle of the building. The other cascade starts with the cafeteria at the south end moving up to meet the first cascade then moving all the way up to the space projecting over the entrance.

The two cascading sequences capture a long connective void between them. At the bottom this void is the auditing area as the central focus of everybody’s attention. Above the void the half-finished cars are moving along their track between the various surrounding production units open to view.

The close integration of all workers is facilitated by the overall transparency of the internal organisation. The mixing of functions avoids the traditional segregation into status groups that is no longer conducive for a modern workplace. A whole series of engineering and administrative functions is located within the trajectory of the manual workforce coming in to work or moving in and out of their lunch break. White collar functions are located both on the ground and on the first floor. Equally some of the blue collar spaces (lockers and social spaces) are located on the first floor. Especially those internal reserve spaces that are waiting for full use in Phase 2 are allocated as social communication spaces to mix blue and white collar workers. This way the establishment of exclusive domain is prevented.

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