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While good design demands rigorous research, innovative experimentation and a good deal of imagination, it also hinges on an intuitive recognition of what works and what doesn’t. Such a resounding moment of recognition, whose significance was amplified by its serendipitous nature, occurred a few years ago when Adrian van Hooydonk, BMW Group’s Head of Design, stumbled upon a faded 50-year-old photograph of a sleek, modest looking car in a light champagne metallic colour, casually parked in front of a beige stone wall. “The car looked like something from the past, but I still found it surprisingly modern”, van Hooydonk recalls. After some digging, it turned out that the mystery car was the BMW Garmisch, a never fully produced prototype developed by the Turin-based Bertone studio as an independent design proposal for BMW.
BMW Garmisch, photo by Stefan Milev, Courtesy BMW Group. 
Despite, or because of, its elusive provenance, unassuming sensibility and one-of-a-kind colour, the car struck a chord with Van Hooydonk who was drawn in by its timeless, clean-cut elegance and classic modernity. The fact that the man behind the BMW Garmisch is Marcello Gandini – one of the most influential car designers of the 20th century whose work has left an indelible mark on the car industry, including Van Hooydonk’s own work – made the discovery all the more thrilling and sparked the idea of recreating the concept car in order to redress to its short-lived past, while paying homage to Bertone’s stylistic influence on the evolution of BMW design. Recreating the BMW Garmisch was a challenge, not least because there were very few original documents to work with, essentially a small selection of period images existed, most of them only available in black and white – an unfortunate situation that would prove particularly challenging when it came to recreating the original paint colour. Fortunately, they had an alternative source of valuable information in Marcello Gandini himself, whose approval and support Van Hooydonk sought in the summer of 2018 as a prerequisite for embarking on the project – “He thought it was a little bit crazy, but he liked it”, Van Hooydonk remembers. Video of BMW Garmish - BMW at Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este. BMW Garmisch - BMW at Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este. 
BMW Garmisch, photo Courtesy BMW Group. 
Gandini was no stranger to the BMW brand at the time he designed the BMW Garmisch as Design Director of the Turin-based Bertone Design studio – a position he held for 14 years during which time he created iconic sports cars like the sleek, sensuous Lamborghini Miura and the futuristic, wedge-shaped Lancia Stratos Zero. When he joined Bertone a few years earlier, the studio was working on proposals for a new four-door model for BMW, a project that would later influence the first BMW 5 Series. In fact, BMW’s relationship with Italian designers goes back to the early days of the company, with illustrious car models like the BMW 328 Mille Migliain the 1930s, theBMW 700 in the early 1960s, and the BMW M1 in the late 1970s, all attesting to its productive nature. At the time of BMW Garmisch’s creation, it was a common practice for Italian automotive design consultancies such as Bertone to showcase their creativity to big car manufacturers, their avant-garde ideas not necessarily intended for full production but rather as proof of their mastery in car design. After a flamboyant, all-green roadster inspired by the BMW 507 showcased at the Geneva Motor Show in 1969, the team at Bertone decided to go for a more subtle, clean-cut design for its next concept car for BMW. “We wanted to create a modern mid-sized coupe that was faithful to BMW’s design language, but that was also more futuristic and even a bit provocative” explains Gandini. The result is a car of understated sophistication, |
