Reports: Frankfurt Motor Show 2011 - Staging Individual Mobility of Tomorrow
Size and effort alone permit comparing the exhibition appearances at the Frankfurt Motor Show 2011 with automobile museums and brand worlds, although as interior spaces of existing exhibition halls hermetically sealed off from the outside world. Via a long escalator, Kauffmann & Theilig offer visitors the opportunity to ascend to the third level of the Mercedes Hall where, similar to an opera house, vehicles can be observed from galleries and inspected in box seating areas. At the same time, they can view the media spectacle on stage with its backdrop of the 40 m long and 12 m tall LED curtains equipped with 4 million pixels (ill. 2). This promenade terminates at the cafe with its view of the canyon-like atrium and the stage where vehicles turn and turn during presentations. While Mercedes lines the entrance to the luxury car area with Smarts, BMW places the Mini stand with its own individual identity in front of the exhibition of their "big ones". Opposed to the vertically oriented emotional cacophony of the Mercedes Atrium, BMW's appearance in the new Hall 11 is characterized by its capaciousness: the catwalk-like galleries oriented along the central axis penetrate dynamically placed frames and are bordered by ample voids on both sides. The exterior wall is circumscribed by a 280 m long track along which electrically powered vehicles drive past the 400 seat grandstand (ill. 1) and beneath the lounge - the screaming of engine noises lives on merely in historic videos. As the sole freestanding pavilion, the "Audi Ring" by Schmidhuber + Partner dominates the agora situated between the exhibition halls (ill. 3, 4). While the sharp-edged, folded surfaces of the Mercedes Hall seem rather reminiscent of the prismatic building envelope of the Porsche Museum, and BMW's appearance, with its strictly orthogonal composition, clearly distances itself from the curves of Munich's BMW World, Schmidhuber + Partner aim at coalescing the language of forms of automotive designs and architecture in even greater coherence than Stuttgart's Mercedes-Benz Museum.
