Chris Bangle article

[Jaguar D-Type]

From NY Times:

AUTOS ON MONDAY | DESIGN
Coming to BMW: Bangle 2.0
By PHIL PATTON

Published: January 10, 2005

CHRIS BANGLE, chief of design at BMW, draws a very clear sketch of the history of his profession.

The metaphor of the automobile as a house on wheels represents the earliest stage of development. Car-as-house was followed by car-as-ship (the streamlined metal-hull era) and car-as-appliance (the responsible, efficiency-oriented period).

But what really interests him is the next stage. In a program called GINA he hopes to change radically the way BMW designs and manufactures cars. The creased shapes of recent BMW's have been polarizing, but to hear Mr. Bangle tell it, he has barely begun.

Word of GINA has trickled out through Mr. Bangle's speeches. He says he will add to his account in a presentation at the AutoWeek Design Forum in Detroit on Wednesday.

"GINA is not a car or a style but a search for a new method, a philosophy," Mr. Bangle explained in a recent telephone interview.

GINA, he said, is a quest for a new design and manufacturing framework that would emphasize materials. "GINA uses as one of its fundamental building blocks the idea of looking for emotion in materials," Mr. Bangle said.

He said he thought designers were close to exhausting the emotional capacity of materials traditionally used in cars. "If the car simply becomes a platform to hang gadgets off, then we will have lost the game," he said.

Mr. Bangle is one of the few designers who thinks beyond simple "brand cues," who still dreams of cars as major cultural objects.

"We're in a period of dramatic stagnation," Mr. Bangle said of the state of auto design. "Such periods usually precede a dramatic change.

"The goal," he added, "is to create a vehicle that is an emotional contributor to the fabric of life."

New York Times