STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

In its centenary year, I am really up to here with the Bauhaus. If I see another newspaper supplement telling me a bright yellow wastepaper basket is ‘Bauhaus Design’, I will stick it up their Vorkurs. But there is no gainsaying the Bauhaus’ enduring influence beyond gaily coloured homeware. That Vorkurs (Preliminary Course) was a revolution in art education, proposing that there is a systematic way to design anything. But it was not a style. It was an idea.

A few years ago BMW found itself sponsoring an exhibition at Tate Modern about the Bauhaus teachers Moholy-Nagy and a man who painted squares for a living, Josef Albers. To help BMW take advantage of its generosity I committed an act of intellectual fraud on its behalf, writing a little booklet called Bauhaus + BMW to suggest a direct connection that never in fact existed. Because when in 1938 BMW established its Kunstlerische Gestaltung, Europe’s first dedicated car-design office, there were almost no Bauhaus teachers left in Germany since they were mostly socialists and Jews who had found it prudent to leave.

Bauhaus influence took time to be felt. When in the 1950s BMW began manufacturing cars again, German critics described its ‘Baroque Angels’ as ‘Detroit Machiavellismus’, suggestive of wanton extravagance bent on duping consumers. But soon the Bauhaus-inspired

Gute Form movement exerted itself, the Bauhaus idea continuing after Hitler’s War in Ulm’s Hochschule fur

Gestaltung. There they taught that ‘Good Form’ would be the result of ‘systematic design’. Braun appliances – white boxes or black boxes – are memorable evidence of it. Eventually, the Bauhaus idea emerged in BMW ’s Mittel

Klasse 1500 of 1961. Fuss-free, without decoration and admirably disciplined, the Mittel Klasse (OK, Neue

Klasse) design was capable of evolution from generation to generation. With the Bauhaus teachers in mind, a Harvard professor wrote: ‘In the clarity and truth of the intentions which guided them, they transcend any similar enterprise.’ The same might be said of BMW, and Braun.

But the problem with goodness is that it can be boring. Or so Chris Bangle thought when he joined BMW in 1992. Reversing the Bauhaus doctrine, the new

Banglismus declared: ‘I don’t want to be good. I want to be interesting.’ Witness the notorious 2001 7-series.

Pejoratives followed it everywhere. The infamous ‘Bangle Butt’ joined the famous ‘Hofmeister Kink’ in BMW’s design lexicon. There were online petitions to have Bangle fired and Marc Newson said the Z4 looked as if it had been styled with a machete. Bangle preferred arson to knife-crime and called it ‘flame surfacing’. You know a designer is in trouble when he resorts to metaphor.

This year Bangle was spotted in the echoing chasms of Frankfurt looking haunted, perhaps fearing his legacy may be unfavourably compared to David Cameron’s: a vaulting masterpiece in the art of the fuck-up. But I wonder now if it is too early to say all is forgiven.

BMW ’s current range is technically as it should be, but exact policy in the Kunstlerische department is difficult to determine. If we screw our eyes up and look back 20 years, we can see that Banglismus melded BMW’s carefully evolved, but almost exhausted, Bauhaus language into something both new and consistent. Isn’t that 7-series actually rather handsome?

But that consistency has since disappeared. You have the i-cars, bold attempts at an electrical language for a company whose

Vierzylinder building in Munich looks like an engine. In contrast, you have the 2-series Tourer, designed by a team on horse tranquilisers. When Renault makes a more emotional product in the category, you know something is amiss. Clearly, in Paris they have a superior drug regime.

Meanwhile, today’s Mittel Klasse BMWs are almost invisible. I think this is expressive of doubt and guilt about burning oil. Then, at the top of the range, something weird is going on with chrome and orifices. To hell with the Bauhaus; Chengdu property developers, come on in.

How to explain this diversity? Zeitgeist is a very German word, and the Spirit of the Age is doing no-one any favours. Who, for example, knows what politics is meant to look like today. Left? Right? Meaningless. And new propulsion technologies mean nobody knows what cars are meant to look like any more. So, BMW hedges. The i3 is an exceptional design, the new 1-series is not.

I wonder if there are plans to replace Munich’s Four Cylinder building with an architecture inspired by buzzing electrons. Maybe then Chris Bangle will be destigmatised, if not yet canonised. Because, like the Bauhaus, he had an idea.

‘WHEN RENAULT MAKES A MORE EMOTIONAL PRODUCT THAN BMW, YOU KNOW SOMETHING IS AMISS’

Stephen bayley SB is the individual for whom the term ‘design guru’ could have been coined. He was the founding director of London’s Design Museum and his best-selling books include Sex, Drink and Fast Cars and Taste: the Secret Meaning of Things.