Drive-Thru Office

Zaha Hadid—dressed in black, stately, magisterial, and downright imperial—stands in the middle of the employee cafeteria in her new Central Building, at the BMW factory in Leipzig. Surrounding her, holding food trays, are welders and accountants, robot technicians and quality-control experts, parts specifiers and forklift operators. Some assembly-line personnel wear the new overalls BMW design chief Chris Bangle ordered up from the company’s motorcycle design group. Lunch specials include a tangy goulash bubbling in its pot, and sizzling and steaming fish cooked to order on the spot. On silver conveyer belts overhead the bodies of new BMW 3 Series cars make their way from fabrication to the paint shop. They are softly lit with an almost radioactive blue light—blue is the company color. “The idea of flow is important,” Hadid says. “The flow of spaces into each other, the flow of energy, the flow of information, the flow of inspiration.”

The building—Hadid’s largest project to date—signals a new vision of work in an automotive plant. With administration and production seamlessly joined, the $64 million Central Building is the brain and nerve center of a vast $1.7 billion factory that will make BMW’s most important model. The theatrical flow of cars, which is visible from every part of the open-plan offices, provides a constant reminder to all who work here of the key to the facility’s success: quality production.

The plant is also intended as a dramatic statement about the nature of twenty-first-century manufacturing. The mixing of white- and blue-collar workers, says Peter Claussen, the plant manager who supervised planning and construction, fosters informal communication and overcomes intimidations of rank. “Sometimes they didn’t feel they could speak up,” he says of assembly-line workers. The movement of cars through the building—the centerpiece of the design and key to blending the work worlds—met with resistance from some of the engineers. “A lot of people were skeptical about it,” Claussen says. “They thought it would be too noisy. But the dishes in the canteen are louder than the cars.”

Claussen is the sort of no-nonsense technocrat who can tell you that the 3 Series—which accounts for roughly 50 percent of BMW’s sales—is made of 387 parts and 4,700 welds. He was involved in the project from its inception and helped to draw up the company’s competition brief, which laid out a clear vision of what was needed: a factory to help change its manufacturing methods and match the vaunted Toyota system. Like most automakers, BMW has adopted key elements of that production model. The emphasis is on continuous improvement of small assembly tasks and details. Parts suppliers play a crucial role; in Leipzig many of them have their own facilities at the plant. Inventory is kept slim. “Eighty-five percent of parts arrive on a just-in-time basis,” he says. The variety of optional equipment, color, and trim elements, according to Claussen, means that there are an infinite number of permutations for the car. An order takes five working days to produce; eventually a thousand cars a day will roll out the door.

Celebrated in the landmark 1990 MIT study, The Machine that Changed the World, Toyota’s famous flexible production methods and quality standards remain the model for the industry. The system stresses not only “just-in-time” or “continuous improvement” but also the creation of networks instead of hierarchical grids of authority and process. It involves locating responsibility for decision-making and quality control with each worker, and making managers and line workers partners. In the Toyota plants I’ve visited, both workers and managers wear uniforms and share facilities; the factories also have numerous display boards registering the day’s production and quality numbers.

German and U.S. automakers have tried for years to replicate Toyota’s system. Porsche even hired ex-Toyota engineers to modernize its old craft-based methods. But the process has been incomplete, argues Maryann Keller, auto industry analyst and author of Collision: GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, and the Race to Own the 21st Century. “The German auto industry has yet to respond adequately to the Japanese challenge,” she says. “It still lacks flexibility, cost competitiveness, and global production.” Toyota’s Lexus plant in Tahara, Japan, measures some 63 defects per 100 cars. This is considered an excellent number. In contrast, BMW’s best facility records 93 errors, which is why BMW planners and the Hadid team placed the “audit bureau,” where quality is accessed, in the center of the building—to focus attention and in effect rally the troops. There, every fiftieth car off the line is torn down and tested for flaws, fit, and finish. Manufacturing improvements are devised and problems solved. The resulting quality numbers are certain to become benchmarks for the success of the Leipzig plant.

How automobile companies will operate in the future remains uncertain, so the architects kept spaces as flexible as possible. “All the office space is a common resource,” says Patrik Schumacher, Hadid’s key partner. The meeting rooms are shared—small shedlike structures used on a “reserve” basis. “Everybody at the factory has to have a sense of what’s at stake.” The office layouts are a long way from the cube farms of today, or the evenly deployed desks in the classic Modernist tradition. Workstations can be easily rearranged; desks are open to neighbors and to the soaring space above the terraced floors. “We wanted the complexity and the unpredictability of city life,” Schumacher says. “It is not just doing a job at a desk. Each task is embedded in a whole network of activities, so the space is urban and social.”

The offices are located on several multilevel steplike terraces—Hadid calls them “cascades”—which create distinct areas with an almost neighborhood feel. Current workplace theories place a high value on casual social encounters, “meetings by accident.” In that spirit, the routes people take to and from shared facilities at the Leipzig plant encourage interaction. “You get juxtapositions and layering,” Schumacher says of the bridges, pathways, and staircases connecting the terraces. “Like moving through a city, the flow lines can generate different experiences.” The flexibility of these open offices also allows workers to establish their own semidivided spaces, or what Schumacher calls “a sense of territoriality.”

The building’s theatrical qualities aren’t designed solely for in-house consumption. In recent years leading German automakers have built tourist attractions around the making of cars (VW in Wolfsburg) or have planned and built museums and visitor centers (Porsche, Audi, and Mercedes). All are efforts aimed at burnishing their historic brands. BMW has commissioned Coop Himmelb(l)au to design its new museum and visitor center in Munich, a great protoplasmic glass structure scheduled to finish up next year. The Leipzig plant is also open to the public. Events will showcase new models, tours will be offered, T-shirts will be sold. “We expect about fifty thousand visitors a year,” Claussen says. “It is essential that we open up our process to the public. Customers have a right to see how companies behave. This building has a chance to be a prototype for the future.”

Visitors enter through a high-ceilinged lobby beneath soaring concrete supports. The structure is essentially a set of dramatic trusses. What Hadid calls the “scissor shape” of the building produces courtyards that open interiors to air and light. Some close observers have noted that the truss elements resemble the rear roof pillars of a car. Specifically (and fortuitously, since she claims no intention here) they look like the characteristic corner angle or Eck (German for corner) that has long been a design cue for BMW.

Locating the factory in Leipzig and not Munich, BMW’s home city, was a crucial decision. It reflected the political and social obligations that German companies have felt since reunification. The decision also represents a competitive response to the difficulties of maintaining manufacturing in Europe in the face of globalism. To reduce costs, many European automakers are looking to Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, Mexico, even the United States.

By building a plant in the former East Germany, BMW was eligible for subsidies from the federal and regional governments and the European Union amounting to more than half a billion dollars. The Schroeder government has been trying to loosen restrictions without losing its social safety net or jeopardizing the green policies that require automakers to take back and recycle cars. BMW negotiated special work rules with the powerful automobile union. Nevertheless, wages in the east remain 10 to 15 percent lower than in the western part of Germany.

Currency fluctuations—the falling dollar, in particular—have hurt European automakers. But a decade ago BMW began manufacturing in a country with lower labor costs—the United States (or as one executive referred to the nonunion states, “our Mexico”). Indeed it was in the plant near Spartanburg, South Carolina, where BMW first tried mingling white- and blue-collar facilities. Executives set up production management offices right on the floor of the plant. The implementation of the idea was uneven, but the results were promising enough to inspire the Leipzig plant.

The heroic factories of Ford and Fiat from the early days of the auto industry were famous inspirations to Modern architects. But those temples to mass production—the dramatic glass-walled buildings punctuated with exterior conveyors and topped with sawtooth roofs—were almost always separated from their administrative offices. Albert Kahn, who created the prototypical Detroit factories at Highland Park and River Rouge, placed the offices inside buildings whose exterior architecture was watered-down Geor-gian or Beaux Arts styles. Reyner Banham observed that the photographs of Detroit factories that inspired Modernists never included the front entrances to the factories or the administrative offices.

That a somewhat rigid organization like BMW could embrace Hadid’s vision is a measure of its willingness to change—and an admission of its necessity to do so. When BMW hired her in May 2002, Hadid’s reputation was still based largely on unbuilt work. She won the commission after the second round of 27 competition submissions were winnowed to 8 finalists, among them Greg Lynn, Helmut Jahn, and Richard Rogers. The finished building looks like the original drawings. It is an implicit answer to those critics who doubted whether Hadid’s architecture could move from two dimensions—her visionary drawings—to three. But, she insists, the flow and transparency in the Leipzig factory have long been part of her architecture: “Movement and emotion were always there.”

Hadid in turn seems to have mellowed. At a symposium after the factory tour, Hadid answered questions about the goals of architecture. For years the language she used to describe her projects was steeped in jargon and theory. Now she speaks more plainly and humanely. “Architecture is about feeling good in a space,” she says. “And for that you have to have generosity of spirit.” Hadid’s great project has always been to pick up the fallen mantle of heroic Modernism. Others may have given up on an idealistic future, but she clings to it. “In the past, venturing into the future came to seem a negative. People didn’t believe in what I call ‘the fantastic.’ You can visualize how you want work to be in the future. You can make things most people think impossible if you have an optimistic vision of the future.”

Ultimately the test for the ideas embodied in the new building will be the experience of working there. It’s the question of whether Hadid’s facility becomes the heart as well as the head of the factory.