BMW’s Bangle bids adieu: A design retrospective

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Word out of Munich this morning is that Chris Bangle, 52, the U.S.-born, Art Center-trained designer who has shaped BMW styling since 1992, is leaving the company to pursue other design work “beyond the automotive industry,� according to a company statement.

So ends the tenure of a man who is certainly among the most controversial and derided car designers in history, a man whose name became synonymous with a kind of artsy over-reach and peculiar, consensus-of-one design vocabulary. Bangle will forever be remembered for the 2002-08 7-series (E65) trunk lid, a prominent and distracting form nicknamed the Bangle Butt (pictured right). The trunk lid, however, was as much Adrian Van Hooydonk’s work as Bangle’s. Hooydonk, 44, will succeed Bangle as BMW’s chief of global design.

Far more egregious, in this critic’s view, was Bangle’s championing of the so-called “flame-surfacing� design language imprinted on the BMW Z4 sports car (2002-present), a look that I said at the time “has less the leap and flicker of fire than the loose luff of wet canvas.� The oddly intersecting accent lines seemed to utterly stop visual forward motion and, when translated to the new BMW 1-series, suggested the car had somehow broken its frame. Bangle’s determination to educate critics on the virtues of flame surfacing never paid off. That said, in the Bangle years, BMW’s global sales grew dramatically, and I expect that was part of the reason the company’s board stood by him.

It’s an open secret in the car business that after the controversies surrounding the Z4 and 7-series, Bangle was demoted up in 2003, from head of BMW brand design to the global design chief for BMW Group, overseeing but not quite leading the designs of BMW Mini, Rolls-Royce and BMW brand. In recent years, the fire of flame surfacing has been put out and BMW cars exhibit a more determined and sober styling.

And it’s interesting to note that Bangle joins a growing list of celebrity car designers -– Henrik Fisker (formerly of BMW and Aston Martin) and Frank Stephenson (formerly of Mini, Fiat-Ferrari) -– who quit their global sinecures at the peak of their powers.

Bangle’s many critics tend to oversimplify the process of car design, which is never an inspired brush-to-canvas moment but rather an agonizing slog through a million compromises dealing with the most debilitating minutiae, such as country-by-country legal restrictions on headlamp height, the cost per unit of this piece of trim or that, or dealing with the myriad immovable “hard points� that come with platform- and parts-sharing. It is also a highly collaborative effort, in which the head of design gets the credit or blame regardless of who held the pen originally. Considering what a miserable, rear-guard action car design is, it’s perhaps not surprising that its most aesthetically ambitious stars give up in frustration.

Other designers –- Philippe Starck comes to mind –- have more talent and imagination than can find expression in one product line or another, and perhaps Bangle will start designing buildings, boats, lamps or tableware. But it’s unlikely that the car business will ever again see a single auteur with the power to so utterly shape a global brand. Bangle will be missed.

For your entertainment, we’ve compiled a little Bangle retrospective.

-- Dan Neil

BMW 1-series convertible

BMW 528Xi

BMW Z4 roadster

BMW X5

BMW X3