tachyon

"We as a car design culture design beyond nations. We design for planets. We live in a digital world where every action has a counteraction. We have to take into account the cultures that we define and sometimes react against.
"There's a relationship between car designers and architects that goes back to the beginning when cars followed modernists (such as the Bauhaus movement of art and architecture dating back to 1902). Architects were creating buildings that years later would have vehicles to match.
"When the buildings of modernists were being built, cars were in their Baroque [a less complex and more realistic European art movement dating from the 1600s] era ('60s). It wasn't until much later?the 1970s?when we were able to create cars that matched buildings designed in the '40s. Architecture marched on and gave us more modern buildings that required cars to catch up.
"For a long time, people asked how come all cars look like refrigerators. Well, they did because the architectural and mechanical underpinnings stopped moving and car companies decided to make them all the same. We got products like four nice cars, which basically had four identical doors. This was a risk for BMW. It got to a point where we had stopped moving and that's the point where we cut and pasted and shaped our product.
"You have to move and you've got to understand that a brand is not a fortress. Design is there to help brand promise meaning. There are some brands out there that never move. When you don't move, the world moves around you. And you know if you don't stay flexible, and you don't stay dynamic, you don't stay at your peak, you don't know where the next attack is going to come from. It could even come from your fan base. How do you react to that?" ?Chris Bangle

The full text of the speech is attached.