Architect Zaha Hadid may not be the first name to cross your mind when you think “concept car.” But after creating a plant for BMW in Leipzig, Germany, and a car park in Strasbourg, France, Hadid needed to design an actual car to complete her automotive set. Or so thought car collector and art dealer Kenny Schachter, who had exhibited work from her studio at his London gallery. Craving a way to combine design with his love of cars, he commissioned Hadid last fall to create an original concept car. The resulting Z.Car project, which will premiere at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, might be viewed as the first car designed for the new century. Hadid’s very unlikelihood made her ideal for the job.
“Her buildings are elegant vessels that cut through space,” says Schachter. “The choice was simple and obvious, but the best things usually are. Good design blurs distinctions about genre, and all her works have movement built into them. The design for a car is an obvious conclusion to the work that preceded it.”
Of that work, the first automotive project from Zaha Hadid Studio was the parking structure for an outlying Strasbourg tram station, which opened in 2001. Hadid’s concept was to create a constantly shifting whole by integrating the fields and lines of the building, the paths of the cars and the movements of the users. The parking grid was treated as a “landscape,” with visual features that guide users both within the parking area and between it and the tram station.
Lines of light not only on the ceiling but also along the floor reinforce the travel lanes. On the concrete, white lines that guide the cars into their spaces start out parallel at the entrance, then curve gently with the boundaries of the site. Each parking space is marked by a vertical light post; their upper ends maintain a constant datum height even as the floor slab under them tilts. An area of darker concrete cuts at an angle through the flowing lines like a shadow to link the tram station with the car park.
To progress from a parking structure to car manufacturing plant is a big step, perhaps, but it is also a step back in the chronology of the car: It must be built before it can be parked.
The Leipzig plant was created in 2002. From the outset, Hadid’s goal was to reflect BMW’s brand values of uniqueness and outstanding performance. Like all her works, its architectural language rejects repetitive and preconceived forms that lack imagination or relation to the site, even if they are the simplest to build. Computer-aided product-design software permits the studio to generate plans for organic, curvilinear structures that can be easily and affordably manufactured. What better client than an automaker whose products rely on the advanced designs created by engineers who use similar software?
The central building is the confluence point for the flow of cars, people and goods through the plant. The studio calls it a “compression chamber” among the three main segments of auto production: body-in-white (the raw shell of the car), paint shop and assembly. Its top floor projects over the drop-off point at the main entrance, with views through the lobby deep into the building itself. Radically unlike the rectilinear boxes of most car plants, Hadid’s structure has courtyards inserted deep into its heart, bringing daylight and visibility where traditionally none was provided.
Organized as a pair of cascaded plates, like staircases, that overlap in the middle, the building’s form overlooks a central focus: the quality-control area. Partly assembled BMWs move overhead from station to station on tracks, clearly showing the sequential steps of vehicle assembly.