In 2002, the German auto giant BMW funded a prestigious competition to design a Central Building at its factory on the outskirts of Leipzig, a $1.55 billion complex where 5,000 employees can assemble up to 650 of BMW’s 3-Series sports cars daily. From 25 invited international architects, Zaha Hadid got the key with her extraordinary design. The £34 million project targets to gather factory and office in a shared experience of manufacturing cars.
The Central Building is the active nerve-center or brain of the entire factory complex. It is connecting three production buildings, serving a common space for workers, management, technicians and visitors. All threads of the building’s activities accumulate together and spread out again from here. Canteens and social rooms, staff assembly halls, quality control bays and entrance halls are all hosted within the open, flowing spatial continuum.
By placing the administrative building between adjacent factory buildings, BMW rejects any standard separation between labor and service. Blue-collar factory workers and white-collar managers synergy in a fluid matrix of automotive production and administration. This design strategy applies to the cycles and trajectories of people, workers (arriving in the morning and back for lunch) and visitors, as well as for the cycle and progress of the production line which pass across this central point, departing and returning again.
Cars in various levels of completion pass through the Central Building, moving along tracks as they move between production areas, while the employees and public visitors could view them. The inside activities, from executive offices to production areas, a shape of star-like structure is defying to conventional concepts of a hierarchical workplace by placing both administrative and factory sections in equal grade to the central core.
Large office spaces for administration contain enclosed glass-panels for meetings, while laboratory and conference rooms are connected by ramps, stairs, and hallways, and even expressed by conveyor belts, which are illuminated in blue. The plan allowed the legal foundation for the construction of the automobile plant and additional commercial and industrial lots to be created, infrastructure measures to be applied and landscape compensation measures to be executed within a period of less than two years.
“The Central Building is the active nerve-center or brain of the whole factory complex (where) all the threads of the building’s activities gather together and branch out again from here,” Hadid says. This analogy not only influences the building’s exterior design but also it’s interior, though it is dominant here.
The interior overlaps the various threads in the ceilings, roofs, and circulation; assembling lines that cut through the spaces as they move slowly from one factory building to another. This gesture not only shows the unfinished product but also illustrates the company’s integrative approach to business. The multi-story interior helps to direct the visitor in the highly complex space that steps to three stories where necessary, responding to the site and BMW’s functional requirements. Its entrance is an immense arrangement of concrete fins, beams and glass. The lobby allows views deep into the building and is occasionally emphasized by courtyards to allow daylight and improve visibility deeper into the space.
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