[tchanson]

I've finally had my fill of the fitfully self-absorbed Mr. Bangle. First the 7, then the pointlessly angular Z4, and now my 5 is going to be replaced by this odd creation with the Dame Edna headlights?

Bad design does not grow more attractive over time. As the immortal B.B. King once sang, "beauty may be only skin deep, but ugly goes straight to the bone"...

With apologies for the length, the following is a great article from Salon.com from last December that I found to be on point.

Tim

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Bilbao on Wheels

Cadillac's hard-edged "Art & Science" styling may or may not wear well, but
it looks good now. The same can't be said for BMW's competing attempt to be
radical, which the company's design chief Chris Bangle calls "flame
surfacing" - a styling jag so distressing to modernist import-buyers that it
recently made the front page of the New York Times. (Does editor Howell
Raines know his demographic or what?) When I first dissed Bangle's new Z4
roadster, several readers e-mailed to suggest that I would soon get used to
its forced collision of shifting planes and curves, recognizing it as the
pathbreaking masterpiece that Bangle -- who says it is "as big a jump in
terms of aesthetic value systems as there was between an Eve before the fall
... and an Eve after the fall." -- clearly thinks it is. They laughed at
Frank Gehry too, etc.

Sorry! The path isn't breaking for me. The Z4 seems less like Gehry's
masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, than Mather House, a high-rise
Harvard dorm situated on a spectacular bend of the Charles River. Mather
House's architect reasoned that anyone could design a nice building that
looked out on the river. It took a true genius to design a building that
completely ignored the river! So the only river views in Mather are from the
small windows in the bathrooms, while the building faces instead toward the
shabby neighborhoods of central Cambridge.

Likewise, it's easy to design a sexy, beautiful two-seat, rear-drive
roadster. Stick a halfway decent body on a chassis as good as BMW's, and
you'll sell hundreds of thousands of units. It took a true genius like
Bangle to produce a two-seat design so visually jarring that BMW executives
actually have to worry about whether it will sell.

Anyway, they didn't laugh at Gehry. Bilbao was instantly recognized as a
triumph. Bangle's car looks Gehryesque, with its undulating planes and
surprising cuts - e.g., the so-called "Bungle line" extending down from the
windshield angle to the running board. But it's a car, not a building, and
functionality has greater claims on it -- for one thing, it has to be
aerodynamic in a way the Guggenheim museum needn't be. (Why didn't Bangle's
designers make the wheels an irregular quadrangle while they were at it?)
Some car shapes -- like the shapes of beautiful women, or men, or rivers --
may innately more appealing than other shapes that clever, well-educated
designers might invent.

Britain's Car magazine calls the Z4 "demanding to look at," a nice way of
putting it, and Automobile's estimable design critic, Robert Cumberford,
goes a step further, proclaiming it "largely successful." Cumberford, like
my e-mailers, predicts that soon we "all will have become so well used to
the new look(s) of the various [BMW models] that ugly is the last word we'll
want to use to describe BMW's in the twenty-first century." OK. I won't use
"ugly." I'll say the Z4 is a joyless, fish-mouthed jumble and (my
prediction) a commercial misstep. Like the Z3 before it, it manages to be
simultaneously too effete and too macho. Unlike the Z3, it's cleverly done -
various unnecessary lines flow into various other unnecessary lines in a
seamless, laboriously thought-out fashion. But the extra lines add nothing -
any attraction the car has comes from the basic shape, not the grim riffs
Bangle and his crew have added to its surface. (Another objection to the Z4
is that its weirdness is only superficial, applied like make-up; for a
profoundly weird car, take a look at the Fiat Multipla.)

Even if you like the riffing, the Z4 has a fatal flaw that Cumberford notes
-- the "relative weakness of the rear fender form." Basically, the bulge
over the rear wheels is too small relative to the curve over the front
wheels, giving the car a wimpy, declining profile. The Z3 had the same
problem, leading one to suspect it's a congenital Bangle defect. For all the
Z4's convolutions, if you squint it looks like a fat little tub (though,
admittedly, not as fat a little tub as the Lexus SC 430 ).

When I first got a longish look at the Z4 in the flesh - a black version,
heading away from me, at night -- I thought I'd have to rethink this
assessment. And BMW's print ads also manage somehow (Photoshop?) to make the
haunches look more powerful. But now I've looked at a dozen Z4s, in various
colors, in bright sunlight, and I can say I've never been less excited by
the sight of a new two-seat sports car. Erase 50 percent of Bangle's
brainstorms and you might have something - I felt like grabbing a tub of
Bondo and smoothing it out right there in the dealer's lot. It didn't help
that the Z4's paint job, which is supposed to reflect light from its complex
surfaces in interesting ways, was not as good as you'd want for
$34,000-45,000.

I suspect the main reason we won't get used to Bangle's "flame-surfacing" --
the reason the prediction of Cumberford and my e-mailers is wrong - is that
BMW itself will chicken out and pull back from faux-Gehryism. Take a look at
the spy photos of the new 6 series and 5 series. They have Bangle's high,
Dodge Stratus-like rear deck, but none of the draughtsman's-compass-run-amok
"flame surfaced" planes. They look less like "moving works of art" than a
3-year-old Pontiac Grand Prix. Not that there's anything wrong with it!
It's true that Bangle has said that his radicalism would be applied to lower
volume niche vehicles rather than high-volume sedans. And the New York
Times' Phil Patton recently suggested that "flame surfacing" will live on,
as BMW pursues not one but two radical styling directions, one for luxury
cars and one for the company's "sportier, more dynamic models." Patton notes
that the expensive new BMW 7 Series, also controversial, was actually based
on a design by BMW's Adrian van Hooydonk, while the "flame surfacing" of the
Z4 came out of a 1996 brainstorming session and two concept cars by Chris
Chapman of BMW's California studio. Under this two-style theory, which seems
to emanate from company headquarters, the Bilbao-on-Wheels look will
continue in the company's forthcoming small "1 Series" cars, as well as the
Z4.

I don't buy it. Is the idea really that wealthier BMW buyers will get
Hooydonk's smooth, powerful designs, while less well-heeled BMW customers
get sent in Chapman's uglier (sorry -- that just popped out) direction. What
kind of "branding" strategy would countenance this split? Usually it's the
style of the more expensive cars that's part of what sells the cheaper cars.
"Flame surfacing" made its first appearance, after all, in the silly
Gaudiesque details stuck onto the front of the current 3 Series sedan, BMW's
core, non-niche, bread-and-butter model. Now the expressionist outbursts are
to be confined to the niches and lower ranks. I suspect BMWs
different-styles-for-different-models spiel will turn out to be mainly a
useful theoretical cover while the company quietly snuffs out "flame
surfacing."

Spiel is the operative word here. Bangle is clearly some kind of talker --
"during an hourlong interview," reports the NYT's Danny Hakim, "he mentioned
Archimedes, Vermeer, Pythagoras, Euclid and the British art historian
Kenneth Clark." In this, Bangle's not unlike those modern artists who seem
to care less about what they draw or paint than the accompanying text, a
process effectively ridiculed in Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word.
If words were cars, Bangle would be in great shape. If cars were "art" - or
even architecture -- he'd be in great shape. But cars aren't art, and words
aren't cars, and cars aren't buildings, and he's not.