New Factory Designs
Lance
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 Mattè-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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/arts/design/22ouro.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print