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BMW GINA Concept

BMW GINA Concept Posted June 11, 2008 Filed under: Wow!, industrial design, video | BMW has just unveiled their latest concept called GINA Light Visionary - GINA being an acronym for their design philosophy behind: Geometry and Functions In ‘N’ Adaptations (I suppose GINA sounds cooler than GIFNA?). At my first glance, I thought it was not too radical - the initial impression was a concept that was probably a sportier extension of the Mille Miglia concept unveiled back in 2006.

But after going through the video (in Youtube above), I realized it was a rather radical and refreshing perspective of automotive design - this may yet be a watershed in automotive styling. BMW has always been experts in dealing with expressive surfaces (that are often sharply ‘clipped’), with one of their master strokes being the iconic negative curvature found along the sides of many of its sportier cars. But I think in GINA they re-thought the whole tradition of car body designs. In typical automotive designs, you have a certain structure on which you add metallic panels on. You can style these panels in as many ways as there are cars on market now - but they are generally all seen as panels. The associated possible actions are linked to traditional metal sheet forming technologies - bending, rolling, cutting, etc., as the automotive designers think of themselves as sculptors, adding or coring away extra ‘clay’. In GINA, instead of hard panels, the body is conceived more like a soft skin wrapping against a skeleton body. While it may very well be made of metal panels eventually just like any other cars, the important thing is at the design level, the ’skin’ metaphor brings out a whole set of different analogies and thus designs - you’re thinking about creases, pinching, pricking, etc. Design is thus by growing and subtracting the inner skeleton (which then defines the creases). I particularly liked the quote by Chris Bangle in the video: “…let’s let material talk in a different manner; and let the tooling be a different issue, instead of just a way to give us form.“

原版網路文章擷取出處 : http://gemssty.com/2008/06/11/bmw-gina-concept/