Germany’s car manufacturers are competing to build ultra-modern palaces to display their wares. Andrew Eames goes along for the ride.
Last October, a flamboyant new visitor attraction opened in downtown Munich, right next to the Olympic Park – a massive glass and steel construction designed by Viennese architects Coop Himmelblau, who also recently finished an urban entertainment centre in Mexico. This Munich building is transparent, cost E100 million (US$146.75 million) to construct, and looks a bit like a frozen tornado hiding in an ear-drum. In an interior where nothing is perpendicular or symmetrical there are restaurants, shops, meeting venues and whirled vortices dotted with what American architect Frank Gehry has called “cultural expressions of movement”. Cars, to you and me.
For this is BMW Welt (BMW World), the latest high-profile architectural installation from one of Germany’s car manufacturers. Like the others that came before it – VW, Audi and Mercedes have all recently opened flagship visitor centres – it redefines the concept of a factory outlet; this is not retailing, it is a leisure experience-cum-delivery centre for a high-end German car manufacturer, sitting alongside its Munich car plant.
Most factory outlets are about pulling in the punters and making them part with their cash, but these new automotive installations are far more subtle than that. Indeed, the revenue from BMW Welt will be minuscule compared to its multimillion-euro build cost – a few cents here and there from catering, souvenirs, and entry fees for the Junior Campus, a digital adventure centre for kids. But then this, like its fellow temples to vroom, is not a sales outlet. It’s a massive flag-waving exercise which is all about brand image, brand loyalty and raising the brand profile. And at BMW there’s even more money being spent on the BMW Museum, due to open this year.
There’s no denying the popularity of these places, which are outstripping traditional art galleries or museums in terms of visitor numbers. An estimated 800,000 people will cross BMW Welt’s threshold this year alone, of whom 150,000 will go on to experience the new Production Mile factory tour. The company and its subcontractors are employing 200 people to help cope with the flow.
But BMW is a johnny-come-lately in the auto-palace market. In 2006, the German chancellor Angela Merkel opened its arch-rival Mercedes’ museum, a “voyage of discovery through automotive history”, next to its factory in Stuttgart. In a building reminiscent of New York’s Guggenheim, the Dutch architect Ben van Berkel has also replaced internal right angles with concave and convex shapes, so the visitor feels rather like a ball-bearing rolling down through the works. Above the entry is a statue of Kaiser Wilhelm II, standing next to his horse, inscribed with his declaration: “I believe in the horse. The car is just a temporary phenomenon.” He got that right, then.
Mercedes invested an estimated E150 million (US$220.12 million) in this building, but its associated factory tour doesn’t have quite the same pull as BMW’s, because no cars are assembled here, only engines, transmissions and axles.
The real pioneer of automotive visitor attractions is Volkswagen. Located in Wolfsburg to the east of Hanover, a town which only came into being after the founding of VW back in 1935, its car factory is the size of Gibraltar. And alongside that factory, VW created Autostadt back in 2000. Part art, part theme park, part science museum and part soft-sell, it comes in 12 pavilions of glass and steel set in 25 hectares of modernist lakeland.
The main building fronting the canal looks like a cross between an airport departure hall and the Pompidou Centre, and some of its contents try to be equally arty. In a massive atrium a giant suspended globe flashes metaphysical messages about the mystery of motors, and one of the building’s four cinemas plays a surreal IMAX film about a girl’s pursuit of absolute safety, stunningly shot in Iceland, which doesn’t contain a single mention of a car.
Elsewhere, the info-tainment is more down-to-earth. In the AutoLab you can design a steering-wheel or test-drive a car on a rolling track to evaluate your driving technique – and of course to demonstrate the efficiency of the car. The kids’ centre (one of four in Autostadt – VW is keen to snare its customers early) has a go-kart track and giant glass engine with a four-storey labyrinth inside.
Outside, the modernist lakeland is studded with the various brand pavilions (the VW group also includes Bentley, Skoda, Audi, Seat and Lamborghini) and the ZeitHaus, a motor museum.
But even the brand pavilions rarely resort to anything so crass as parading a car. The VW installation has a film about two girls in pursuit of perfection, Skoda lingers over Bohemian handicrafts, and Audi meditates on the significance of its inter-connecting rings.
Traditional factory tours always end up in the shop, and at least Autostadt conforms to that expectation. The two 36.6-metre-high cylinders of glass at the back of the lakeland are effectively multi-storey car parks, and every day up to 700 vehicles are shuffled robotically down inside these Car Towers to be handed over to their new owners. Apparently up to 40 percent of European customers think that this pilgrimage is worth their while.
For these customers, already committed to the VW ideology, Autostadt must seem like glorious affirmation that they have made the right choice of vehicle. For non-VW customers the rationale is less clear. The project cost a cool E350 million (US$513.62 million) and employs 500 staff to deal with 1.2 million visitors a year. You have to wonder just how many extra Lupos it has to sell to get its money back.
Whatever the bottom line, VW has continued – and even expanded upon – its policy of turning manufacturing into a cultural experience over in its newest factory in Dresden. Here the glass-walled Glaserne Manufaktur looks like a car-maker’s mime, played deliberately slow to a stream of visitors in specially designed galleries. There’s a hum of concentration as white-clad workers pad around their subjects on parquet floors, performing delicate internal operations with white-gloved hands. There’s no banging, no shouting, no background music or tannoy announcements, just the occasional “whazzat!” of an air-pressure hose powering some tool or other. There’s not even any obvious production-line progress – until you fix on a point on the wall, and realise that the whole thing is moving forward, including the floor.
This is where the top-of-the-range Phaeton is put together, and the idea is to draw the customer into the whole process of a car’s creation, giving them the opportunity to witness the birth of their own vehicle. They are invited to be present at the “marriage” of the body to the power unit, and even to tighten a few screws themselves, before driving off into the sunset with their perfect partners. The result is an intimate bond between man and machine, a loyalty to the brand which has been forged right in the maternity unit.
There’s a similar scenario back in Bavaria where VW’s cousin, Audi, also has new public-facing installations in the town of Ingolstadt. Here 31,000 workers press buttons in a highly-automated production line, but the Audi Forum feels like a modernist university campus, even if the “students” are all dressed in snappy suits and stand around smiling among fountains like animated architects’ models. Ingolstadt doesn’t attract many passing tourists, so the Audi Forum’s clientele is undiluted, almost exclusively Audi acolytes, and the result is a bit too much corporate self-love for this visitor.
The Audi Forum has the same basic ingredients as Autostadt and BMW Welt; the museum-cum-technology centre, this time in a circular building, the customer car collection zone, and the factory tour where you can also witness the marriage between body and chassis, although this time there’s no touching. And Audi plainly thinks this formula is worthwhile because it has replicated the Forum concept in nine other locations, with the largest having just opened in New York, albeit without the manufacturing attached.
Whatever their configuration, all of these centres have the same basic ambitions – to strengthen the manufacturer’s relationship with their customer base and to create an environment which helps to raise the product onto a pedestal (and thereby justify the price).
Underlying these massive investments is some understandable anxiety. In an expanding Europe there are many cheaper places to assemble cars, and in order to be able to justify the expense of maintaining their German-based car plants, the manufacturers are learning to use those car plants for their marketing. They need to persuade customers that a German-made product is worth paying that little bit extra for, with a heady concoction of history, tradition, techno-babble and mysticism.
As BMW’s chairman of the board put it back in 2004, when work on BMW Welt started, visitors should be “submerged into the dense atmosphere of the BMW brand, and carried away by the BMW myth”. After that, purchasing the latest model will seem an entirely logical step, like marrying into a powerful dynasty.
It’s a concept which all the big manufacturers have bought into – once VW started the ball rolling with Autostadt, everyone else had to play the game or risk getting left behind. Whether or not the huge investment will prove to be money wisely spent is a question for the future.
