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Chris Bangle: Iconoclast. Visionary

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The most influential automotive designer of the early 21st century has just left the building. Chris Bangle's departure from BMW will draw cheers and jeers in equal measure from those who remain convinced he butchered the company's cars -- literally: Superstar product designer and auto enthusiast Mark Newson (he owns a DB4 Aston and a Lamborghini Miura) once told me he thought the original Z4 roadster looked like it had been styled with a machete.



BMW Gina concept

Yet Bangle's cloth-covered GINA concept, which features movable elements under the skin that changed the vehicle's surfaces, remains one of the most innovative concept cars ever built. GINA was typical Bangle: an iconoclastic take on something most automotive designers take for granted -- that an automobile's form is, folding-convertible roof aside, immutable.

Chris Bangle's BMWs are deliberately confrontational. Some work (6 Series coupe, current M3); some don't (X3, 1 Series hatch). But his influence on recent automobile design has been profound. Bodyside sections that undulate off a crisp boneline; trunklid bustles; swept-back headlight graphics -- these Bangle design signatures have been subtly appropriated and reinterpreted by automakers as diverse as Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai, Toyota and Chevrolet (take a close look at the new Cruze).

Chris Bangle drawing

Ford global design chief J Mays is no fan, but he admits Bangle has been significant in reshaping modern cars. Ford of Europe's Martin Smith talks of him as an instigator of the trend toward "surface entertainment," something Smith himself has used to great effect with his "Kinetic Design" cars. "He's certainly the most talked about [designer]," says Renault design boss Patrick Le Quement. "His designs have a great deal of presence, and they're well proportioned. He's been highly influential."

When Ohio-born Christopher Edward Bangle was given the top design job at BMW in 1992, it surprised more than a few auto-industry insiders. After graduating from Art Center in the 1980s, Bangle had worked for GM's Opel division in Germany and headed Fiat's design facility in Turin, Italy. But he'd been credited with only one complete car, the Fiat Coupe (below left), which featured unusual slash-like creases defining the upper limit of the wheel openings. They were a hint of things to come.

Fiat Coupe

Bangle's first BMWs -- the E46 3 Series and the X5 -- were relatively conventional. The E46, launched in 1998, was a simple evolution of the previous-generation E36, and I well remember how its conservative looks were a hot talking point among journalists attending the car's launch in Spain. I still remind colleagues who later lauded the E46 as the last of the good-looking BMWs that at the time they thought it was boring and derivative, just another cookie-cutter BMW with predictably cloned design cues from the larger 5 and 7 Series models.


The media chatter in the aftermath of the E46's launch clearly rattled BMW's senior management team. This was a company that had become hugely successful building cars with a fairly singular design language. And now, journalists were effectively saying, it had run out of adjectives. Change was needed.

Change was needed for another reason: BMW was expanding into new vehicle categories such as SUVs and broadening traditional offerings such as coupes and convertibles across different price and size segments. The cookie-cutter approach simply wouldn't work. What Bangle realized was the company needed a design language that would allow its products to look different, yet still be clearly recognized as BMWs. His solution was to develop dramatic surfaces and startling graphic signatures that would instantly identify the vehicle as a BMW, regardless of its body style or proportions.

2002 BMW 7 Series

Those who believe Chris Bangle single-handedly brutalized BMW design should remember his strategy had the full backing of senior BMW management; they signed Bangle's BMWs into production. And that includes BMW product wunderkind and tastemeister Wolfgang Reitzle, who was fired over his bungled attempt to succeed Bernd Pischetsreider as BMW chairman and later distanced himself from the highly controversial Bangle-designed E65 7 Series (pictured), saying he always meant to go back and fix the car once he'd gotten Pischetsreider's job.

I once toured the Geneva show with Chris Bangle, just the two of us walking around and talking about the cars. The conversation was all off the record -- ever the gentleman, Bangle would never have wanted to be seen to be criticizing his peers' work. But it was worth the caveat, because I learned a lot in that hour or so. Chris Bangle's view of the world is very different from that of most car designers.

Chris Bangle in thought

"You know, my mind is now somewhere else already," he told my colleague Gavin Green in an interview published in Motor Trend a few years back. "I worry that the industry isn't looking far enough forward. We're closing in rapidly at the end of the current paradigm in the evolution of the car, and if this paradigm lasts beyond 2020, I'll be amazed. After that, cars, as we understand them now, will be different animals."

As we look at what's happening to the global auto industry, at how long-accepted business models and consumer assumptions are being turned upside down by economic chaos and growing pressure on resources, it's hard to disagree. "Automobiles are now like computers in 1952," says Bangle. "We're a long way from PCs that you go down to Wal-Mart to pick up. We're miles from where personal mobility could be if it achieves the efficiency and lost-cost dynamic we've come to expect from other industries."

Iconoclast. Visionary. And never boring. Thanks for the ride, Chris.

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