BMW-Werk Leipzig

Intersection of cars, building and landscape

In 2002 Zaha Hadid Architects in collaboration with GROSS. MAX.  won first prize in the international competition for the Central Building and landscape design for the new BMW factory in Leipzig Germany. Subsequently GROSS. Max. was commissioned to design the 200-ha site into a fascinating new landscape for car production which provides a link between radical architecture, functional use, flexible site development, and ecological considerations. This was our first collaboration with Zaha Hadid and at and interesting moment in time when Zaha Hadid was interested in topography and landscape to suggest alternative ways to deal with a large building. The BMW project allowed the team to envisage the surrounding landscape and the inhabited surfaces of the architecture as a continuous system. The combined building and landscape were designed not only to be predominantly functional, but equally with representational requirements, presenting the BMW brand in an almost cinematic way. The Central Building designed by Zaha Hadid Architects is the active nerve center of the whole factory complex, the point where all threads of activity gather and branch out. According to Zaha Hadid: “The Central Building was conceived as an open, city-like space where public, professional and production activities converge and where the social and spatial hierarchies of the traditional workplace are broken down”. The radical rethinking of established paradigms that generated the interior solution was brought to bear on the exterior components as well. The intrinsic problems of a large parking lot in front of a building were avoided by turning it into a dynamic spectacle. The inherent dynamism of vehicle movement and a vast field of car bodies are revealed in the arrangement of parking lots, which allow the whole field to move, colour, and sparkle with swooping trajectories that culminate within the building. Various landscape fields-water/reed poplar trees, coppice-are integrated into this fluid field. The moving spectacle of the car park is set in contrasting system of water retention ponds. Rows of Italian Poplars are planted with ever decreasing centres towards the central building which causes the illusion of the acceleration of a typical BMW from 0-100 miles an hour. White painted ‘road mark’ cars are occasionally outlined in the normative arrangement of the parking lot. A loose scattering of fruit trees follows the path that penetrates the space between the factories. They create a romantic interlude in the factory’s rigorous production process. The overall landscape design of the new BMW plant relates to the scale and character of the surrounding agricultural landscape. The extensive use of rows of lime trees reflects upon the origin of the name of Leipzig as ‘place of limes.