«Bangle is undoubtedly the most influent car designer of his generation» wrote Phil Patton in 2006 in The New York Times. Bangle worked for Opel, Fiat, and for 17 years he has been chief of design of BMW ‒ right up to 2009.
Today Chris Bangle lives in Italy in Borgata Gorrea, Clavesana, in the province of Cuneo. Here he created his creative village, a special place where he lives, works and hosts young designers from all over the world. Reading his biography, I had the sharp impression I was dealing with an anti-designer, someone who has always valued connecting with people, in first place, as allowing me to interview him proves.
“I’ve traveled enough round the world to know that all flesh is good and worth the same, but that is why one gets tired and tries to put down roots, to make land and country for himself, that his flesh might be worth and stay a little more than a common round of season.” (Cesare Pavese, The moon and the bonfires).
Chris, you’ve been living for some years in Italy, in the Piedmontese Langhe so wonderfully described in Pavese’s book. To make land and country for himself, what would it mean for you?
If by that you mean the need to “aquire land and put down roots” then, yes, I suppose that is a bit of what my wife Catherine and I felt in coming here. We had never owned a house before, much less a couple of small vineyards and barns and all that. But we were searching for the possibility to be “us” where the very “us-ness” was formed initially; in the wider Torino-Langhe environs where we had spent the first seven years of our marriage. We enjoyed Germany very much, especially Munich, but when people would as “where are you from?” I would always respond: “Catherine is Swiss and I am American but “we” are from Italy;” it was where we were forged as a couple. Nietzsche said “Torino is the only city where I am possible”; I would venture to say that Clavesana and the Borgata Gorrea is the best place for “us” – Catherine and I – to be possible.
In your creative village, your home-lab, you host young designers and hold workshops for them. What’s the first thing you tell them about creativity? Is it possible to teach the search for transparency and lightness in a project?
The young designers have many pre-formed ideas and approaches that they favor, just like anyone. Their understanding of the tool-sets of design is what they have been taught as “design-professional”; I offer them a type of experience that is less slick but more visceral. Here we try to confront our suppositions and tailor the process to the “WHY” of the project; some people can fit across these differences easier than others of course. It is a two-way learning experience; that is for sure. BMW had established procedural norms that made sure a designer contributed in an expected manner and a project had pre-defined parameters to fulfill. In CBA it is much more fluid and dynamic; in part by the unusual and heterogeneous needs of the clients – I didn’t expect to be doing a concept for a nursing home for the elderly in Japan at the same time we were doing a cognac bottle design and making robots – but also in part because it is the creative process driving the results; not a pre-conceived formula. The designers are young with a broad set of experiences that read like the image from a spectrometer – and like such images the interesting part comes from the gaps and discontinuities. I have learned to be humble and allow them to teach me many things about how the world is perceived by the 20-30-somethings. At the same time I try to spread the energy around so that the range of contributions all makes sense and helps each designer and the client.
Designing can be an adventure, like crossing one’s own boundaries and getting to another dimension, where to let research, fantasy and needs fit together. Where did your creative adventure start?
I like to ask questions and see where that takes the discussion; turn the ideas backwards; look at the inverse; examining the anti-task given can teach you a lot about the nature of the task itself you may have taken for granted or just assumed. I also try to learn from people who have unique approaches and see where those fit in my scheme of thought. Our son Derek is good at teasing alternate thinking out of me in our workshops and has taught me some tricks of his own – particularly in applying the lessons of architecture in our design work. From the artist Oifur Eliasson I learned how much of his work is about “renegotiation”, and I have learned to understand that as a fundamental building block to innovation. Our construction at the Borgata demonstrates many opportunities that I have taken to put such renegotiations in practice. If here we are confronted with an “A-or-B” exclusionary choice – a pretty shade tree in the yard or an underground garage that doesn’t leave enough dirt for a tree to grow in – then the trick has been to always go for both A and B… because there are wonderful Cs and Ds that appear when you do. But you have to question your suppositions; just what is A and what is B? What is a tree to you really? As you can see we reconfigured the concept of a “tree” into a very wonderful year-round sculpture that surprisingly bounces colored light into the kitchen as well…and left space for the garage.
We often say “it’s timeless” to underline how the beauty of something goes beyond the simple passing fad. What is beauty for you? Do you have any object of design that in your opinion represents the canon of beauty?
That question comes up often in a discussion about car design; what car was most beautiful, etc. I have always felt that such a vastly human-experience-derived term such as “beauty” must be dealt with in segments, not in over-arching generalizations that in the end don’t mean anything. One must separate the consciously constructed – a car design or painting – from the wonderfully happenstance – a sunset of vista – just as one must be careful not to mix the typologies of beauty that exist in their perfection independent from one another. Can one really compare the lusty exotic beauty of one woman with the fragile innocent beauty of another? That is hardly possible with women or with cars – and probably everything else as well. I like to savor every style of cars without having to exclude a category. “Tragic beauty” is one of my favorites; I often find it in the great carrozzeria designs of the 30s that refuse to allow me to participate as anything other than an observer. It is a type of beauty in a creative world that exists on the other side of the looking-glass; denied to me forever.
Derek has also taught me that architects look not only to the canon but to the canonical; those representations that are not the perfect example but were the critical “first case” that triggered a change in our thinking that allowed a new cannon to emerge. The same is true with beauty; I don’t think the BMW E-60 5Series is in itself a canon of beauty, but it is canonical regarding our change in taste about the “negative surface.”
I also believe there are clues that indicate that some biological functions and laws of physics are at work behind the pleasure of a visual construct (that might actually be understood as “beauty”) and enjoy looking for examples of them at work (you will note the logarithmic spiral in our company logo).
Sculpture, more than painting, puts strain on an artist who has to fight with the strength of the matter to hear it and to have himself heard. What does it mean to you ‒ and how it happens ‒ the How do this forces get in touch in your work ‒ the matter and the thought of the artist ‒ and what does this represent for you?
What a beautiful way of expressing it; “ascoltarla e farsi ascoltare.” Thanks; I will keep that. When asked (referring to a sculpture), people find it useful to drag out the quote about “releasing the form within”, or the axiom that one must “remove all the extraneous until there is nothing less to remove.” Both sound good but are not that helpful when you are in front of a chunk of marble terrified to make that first cut. But the artist is not alone.
I believe strongly in “talking” to the object under creation and giving it a chance to express itself in your mind; that could be how the Muses get in your thoughts to begin with. In the cartoon series I write and draw – Arky Arch Adventures – the role of the Muse is one of a mediator between Arky’s world (and that of the walking/talking “things” with him) of “already is” and our world of “becoming”. Thanks to the Muses we are able to make poor copies of them – when we make an eggbeater it does not walk around and give snappy answers – and congratulate ourselves on our originality.
Although I have implied that one is not alone in the creative struggle it is also true that it is not a fair fight; the artist’s statement may prevail in the physicality of the sculpture but the Muse will forever have the last word in his head; nagging him with doubts and uncertainties of “what might have been” (and the implied “if you had only listened to me!”).
Design may be “art” but a designer is not always an “artist” – certainly not when someone else says when to start and stop in a project. Artists do that for themselves. When the process is done right designers exist for the designed object––not the other way around. In a very real sense we don’t “create” what we design; “it” causes itself to come into being through us. To allow that sort of magic to happen requires you to enter into a dialogue where you must keep both ears open.
Who is today Chris Bangle?
In our studio, inked into the stairs as a reminder, is this quote from Walt Kelly: “It is probably ok to be anything you cannot be when you discover you cannot be everything you are.” I find that describes me quite well; a composite of meanings to persons – “famous/infamous BMW design director”, “artist”, “inventor”, “futurist”, “car design philosopher”, etc. To the people around here I am “il signore della panchine”…the guy with the big benches (we have a charity project running here based on oversized park benches). If you add these up and throw in “husband” and “father” and all those nouns and adjectives I try to live up to, it soon becomes clear that I cannot really fill in the picture that is trying to be painted of me. Maybe I can be a part of those realities, but as Kelly says I have realized I am never everything “I am”. And so maybe I am now free to be anything I cannot be!
I began Arky Arch to see of we could take the concept of walking architecture and apply the gestural language of car designers to a cartoon about things – without using eyeballs and three-fingered gloved hands and shoes and hair ribbons and all those tropes that cartoonists have been using for years to put personality and character into the “things” around us. I reasoned that if car designers can convince you that a car they have created is really a “Jaguar”, complete with feline grace and crouching stance ready to pounce – but without a cute nose and ears and a fuzzy tail – then we could inspire other artists to begin making characters in cartoons without those crutches as well. And maybe kids would see there really is “life” in everything around us without looking for the eyeballs – a good first step in respecting the work the designers and architects and engineers put into making it. And then gesture really will be the new surface.
I would like to make Arky Arch canonical in his own right, but I am sure someone will say that creating a cartoon figure is “not what Chris Bangle does”. Maybe…until now.