Chris Bangle on The Future of Car Design
For your weekend reading pleasure, we present a friend from the past. Chris Bangle of course is the BMW Group’s former head of design and was instrumental in defining the look of the modern MINI from the R50/R53 to the R56. Now having moved on from BMW he has his own consultancy that works with companies in many different verticals. And he also apparently still follows the automotive world as evidenced by his take on the future of car design recently published on his personal blog.
>But now we have eliminated the really ugly cars, and made everything look ok – good but the same. When everything is the same, no matter how good, nothing stands out and is beautiful. The biggest Design Challenge is still waiting to be answered: Global Cultural Enfranchisement in Design. Modernism in Design has become the dominant sort of business-English for getting the job done and in the process has smothered local cultural content and threatened to disenfranchise vast areas of the world that never had a background in the Greek geometrical underpinnings of the Bauhaus.
<p>Would this be the same Chris Bangle who was an expert in designing dull-shaped cars and then covering them with more styling flourishes than even Nissan thought was tasteful back when they made Datsuns? OK, his sort of tacky decoration is fashionable today but in the future people will look back on the Bangle era and say “yeah, BMW really went astray then didn’t they?”.</p>
<p>FWIW Bangle didn’t design any BMWs or MINIs. He simply provided the design vision/strategy and oversaw the execution. Also remover that the flame surfacing era was happening alongside the R50 and R53 MINIs.</p>
<p>“Also remover that the flame surfacing era was happening…”</p>
<p>???</p>
<p>Bangle designed several Bmws included the first Z4</p>
<p>Actually it was designed by Anders Warming who is now the head of MINI design.</p>
<p>it happens that i was sitting near Chris Bangle at a dinner, it took less than 10 seconds to draw the Z4 on the tablecloth</p>
<p>Tell that to Anders :)</p>