Chris Bangle was in the Hub last month. An American, Bangle is the highly-regarded director of BMW Group Design in Munich, Germany. The reason for his visit was to look in on a Suburban Design Studio at Harvard Graduate School of Design where, for an entire semester, architecture students have been laboring to transform the BMW designer’s ideas about new material, efficient structure and dynamic form into suburban housing.


How do we feel about car guys designing houses? We did have architects designing cars in the 20th century: Frank Lloyd Wright achieved some fame customizing his own series of Lincoln Continentals; before moving to Massachusetts, Walter Gropius, founder of The Architects Collaborative, worked on the Adler motorcar; a 1928 sketch by Swiss architect LeCorbusier became the basis for the Volkswagen Beetle in the 1940s. And now BMW believes it can return the favor. Here’s why:


Over the past generation it has been fashionable for people who think about energy and how we have designed the United States to use so much of it, to blame the automobile for our current troubles. Without the car, some say, suburbs would never have prospered. Without suburbs, we would not have the near impossibility in this country of supporting the energy needs of millions of single-family houses and their accompanying automobiles, and the streets and roads and far-flung public utility infrastructure (ice-storm, anyone?) this carelessly designed mix requires.





Grilles and Grills


But really, cars and suburbs have evolved together. They are intertwined in a can’t-have-one-without-the-other way. Suburban houses routinely include garages and carports as part of their form and function; and landscaped driveways to display cars at their front doors. Meanwhile, cars themselves are not designed for inner-cities. And few people ever really drive one across the country. Today’s cars are designed for suburban commuting, that is primarily how they are used. Anyway, in the U.S., suburbs came first back in the 19th century, years before there were cars at all. 


For most of the 20th century suburban houses retained their design lead, from their look to their function. Car designers had to work hard to catch up to architects and make their work seem modern. Look at a photo of any 1920s automobile sitting in front of a house that architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed 30 years earlier. Or even cars of the 1950s pictured in Levittown, N.Y. The houses seem to have a taut energy, a clear form that those fat-fendered cars just do not possess.


But car designers have caught up. And Bangle, one of the best of them, has been visiting Boston regularly for the past few months, as a critic in a Harvard suburban housing design studio. The studio was supported by BMW and the international architecture firm RMJM, whose $1.5 million gift to Harvard last year has funded a series of design explorations like this one taught by Prof. Frank Barkow.





Loving GINA


The work for Barkow and Bangle and their students has been to take the technology developed for the stretchy skin of BMW’s “GINA” Light Visionary Model car – on display now at the new BMW museum in Munich — and explore what it would do for an American suburban house. “GINA” is the acronym for Geometry and functions In “N” Adaptations. It describes a metalicized lycra-based fabric surface that allows for a car to change its shape to retain efficiency at various speeds and airflow conditions. Such an elastic skin also costs less, uses less energy to manufacture, needs less structure, and is much lighter than today’s conventional metal automobile shells. 


Bangle and his BMW design team applied this fabric to the frame of a BMW Z8 sportscar awhile ago with extraordinary results. No door hinges – instead, the doors smoothly bend open; no headlight flaps – instead lights wink at you, the way a human eye might. It is flexible. The GINA fabric creates a skin, not a shell. So the questions for building designers would be: how can such a dynamic material be used in architecture; and when, exactly, would a building need to be this dynamic?


Cars and houses are designed in the same way, both mimicking the human body. An underlying bone structure – wood columns, beams, studs and rafters in suburban houses, metal ribs in cars — is covered by something to keep out weather and give the object – car or building — an overall form. And just as conditions based on performance could change the form of a car, there are reasons one might want to change the form – or size – of a suburban home. Storm coming? Alter the shape to meet heavy wind gusts. Kids going to college? Fold up that room. Guests visiting? Fold it out. Summertime? Open the house like the petals of a flower. Winter? Stretch the fabric tightly shut. All the while designing in a way for us to still recognize the result as a house.





Adjective Architects


Students explored these possibilities and more in the GINA studio, focusing on buildings possessed of kinetic frames; dynamic volumes; flexible skins. Working with an entirely new construction material is not an easy assignment, one reason why even today buildings are mostly constructed with materials and using methods that have been with us for generations. And yet economic and social changes might actually require of us that we rethink how we use materials in buildings. Welcome to design school, as a generation of designers in Boston is beginning to confront this new reality.


The requirement for designers in the current economy is that “they start to pay attention to context rather than dogma,” says Bangle. It is time to release ourselves from a fixed way of designing and develop a flexible way of meeting changed conditions. This, finally, is the difference between GM and BMW, between America and Germany in the current world economy.


While American car companies panhandle Congress for bailout funds, BMW – and they’ve been hit hard, too; their plans call for building 65,000 fewer cars in 2009 than in 2008 – looks ahead to see how their products can become even more closely integrated with their customers’ lives by sending their chief designer to share ideas on new technologies at an American architecture school. 


Clearly the way out of our current economic trouble is through design. Sure, we need reform to come to corporations and institutions; but most of all we need to reformulate how we create new institutions, new relationships, and the buildings and vehicles that shelter them. BMW is on to this. Good news for the coming generation across disciplines and across borders who are going to be using their design products and processes to create what’s next.â–