From River Rouge to Lingotto, car factories, like cinemas, are a truly modern building type, shaped by the technological and commercial demands of the twentieth century. Of their time and for their time they manifested a kind of heroic industrial spirit, even romance in the case of FIAT’s Lingotto plant in Turin with its whizzy roof top test track. At their best, such buildings stretched architectural imagination to devise solutions that could put manufacturers ahead of their competitors and express brand supremacy.
A recurring theme of this issue is the extraordinary lengths today’s car manufacturers will go to in order to hijack architecture in the service of their products. With Hadid, however, you sense BMW have got something rather different - a genuinely radical building, both formally and spatially, that re-envisages the conventions, activities and hierarchies of the industrial workplace and recasts them as an efficient, flexible and dynamic organism. This really is Go Faster architecture.