Beyond the entrance hall lies a modern Piranesian office landscape of terraces, ramps, plateaux and staircases. The building’s primary organisational strategy is a scissors section that fuses ground and first floor into a continuous entity. Two terrace structures, like hanging gardens of Bürolandschaft, step up in opposite directions, along the north-south axis framing a long void in between. At the bottom of the void is the auditing area - every 50th car is pulled off the production line and taken to bits for quality control purposes.
Experientially, individual workers are acutely conscious of being part of a larger enterprise. There are no hierarchies or management offices - each of the 740 Central Building employees, from trainee to CEO, has an identical, no-frills modular workstation. The only enclosed spaces are technical and testing areas on the ground floor and these have large glazed walls like shopfronts overlooking an internal street. ‘Structure creates behaviour’ proclaims BMW somewhat ominously, but within the elaborate contortions of the architecture there is a discernible sense of community, of space and placemaking.