BMW Group Wins Two Gold Awards for Design

This year the Industrial Designer Society of America (IDSA) is
presenting BMW Group designers with no less than two of their extremely
coveted Gold Awards. A huge success both in the USA and worldwide, the
MINI Cooper is the winner of the Transportation category. And,
acknowledging an achievement really unusual for a car manufacturer, the
jury are also presenting their highest award to the BMW Group for a
unique work of art in the Environments category: For the first time,
the BMW Group is receiving this honour for a general design statement,
the Art of Car Design installation, a non-mobile structure created by
BMW Group designers especially for the Munich Pinakothek der Moderne
(Modern Art Museum) opening on 16 September 2003. The BMW F 650 CS
motorcycle as well as the MINI trolley bag in the MINI Lifestyle
collection received the IDEA Award in Bronze. The Industrial Design
Excellence Award (IDEA) is presented once a year by IDSA, the largest
US designer society, together with BusinessWeek, and is one of the most
renowned design prizes the world over. In their judgment based on
aesthetic value, innovation, practical benefits, economic use and
ecological responsibility, the 15-member jury made up of outstanding
designers, scientists and managers applies the highest standards. The
IDEA Awards will be presented in New York on 16 August 2003. BMW Group
designers in Munich and with DesignworksUSA, the BMW Group's design
studio in California, are just as proud of the award they have received
for their work of art in creating the Art of Car Design as they are of
the Gold Award for the MINI Cooper. This work of art certainly quite
unique in its overall dimensions was created for the Vehicle Design
Department of the Pinakothek der Moderne opened last autumn in Munich
and accommodated in the Neue Sammlung, the world's largest Museum for
Design and Applied Art, the world's largest collection of design and
applied art. In all, the wall-mounted installation is 14 metres wide
and 10 metres high, and is made of 25 tonnes of Carrara statuario
marble in a relief structure covering a free-form surface of 120 square
metres with specially arranged vehicle components in the background.
The installation expresses the particular tension of automotive design
within which the rational world of technology, human emotions, and the
search for the perfect form interact with one another. "With this
work of art we seek to dedicate a public statement to everybody
passionately supporting the art of automotive design and motivate them
to keep up this commitment", states BMW's Chief Designer Chris
Bangle. Fragments of forms in automotive design have been transformed
into stone on the heaviest part of the installation, the marble relief.
And unlike all the other exhibits at the Museum, touching and feeling
the emotions on display here is not just allowed, but even desired,
since this is the only way to really experience design in its genuine
form. A film installation going together with the wall installation
serves furthermore to provide a dynamic insight into the world of
automotive design: In a composition produced for six monitors,
communication designers at the BMW Group's DesignworksUSA Studio have
created a multimedia work of art presenting the elaborate process from
the very first drawing all the way to the finished model of the vehicle
to be produced. The design process presented in this way is accompanied
by Philip Glass's minimal music.