Following yesterday's news that BMW's Chris Bangle has quit the business, Driving takes a look at Bangle's "flame" aesthetic:
The "flame surfacing" design language he pioneered involves a contorted mess of convex arcs intersecting each other at sharp angles to create elliptical and trapezoidal contours out of sheet-metal across which, in the right conditions, the light is meant to dance like the flames of a fire. The result has been some of the most unusual shapes seen on BMWs since Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein took part in the company's "art car" initiative in the 70s. Other designers use the name Bangle as a term for a project gone wrong, and "Bangle-butt" has become a derisive label for cars with awkward, protruding trunks. Yet despite the controversy of his designs, Bangle's influence has left an indelible mark on his field and on the industry.
Meanwhile, Wheels 24 posits that Bangle's replacement, Adriaan von Hooydonk, had more to do with "flame surfacing" than most people give credit for, and can be expected to push BMW design into even more radical directions:
Though Chris Bangle shouldered much of the publically expressed anger concerning the forth generation 7 series styling, it was in fact Von Hooydonk who penned the car's lines.
...Von Hooydonk has made his intentions clear. He wishes to push the avant-garde design direction BMW has taken bearings on under Bangle's term even further.
BMW buyers who expected the company's designs (and those of Mini and Rolls-Royce by implication too) to mellow are in for a rude shock. We can only speculate whether [Dutchman] Von Hooydonk likes a smoke with his pancakes in the morning, but his designs are typically sculptural and outlandish in contemporary Dutch design fashion.
We're sure of one thing though. BMW AG board members will be rubbing their eyes or calling for a technician to calibrate their desktop screens when Von Hooydonk's latest signed-off designs are circulated via e-mail.
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