Hasta La Ideas

Reporting by Kat Bauman

This season, Germany is for car lovers. Last week’s Frankfurt Auto Show saw the debut of a slew of new cars—some slated for production, some beautiful, high-functioning pipe dreams. Audi, a fatherland favorite, unveiled several new models, including an A3 E-tron plug-in hybrid, coming soon to an America near you, and a sick 700hp Sport Quattro Concept (above), coming someday to… something, maybe.

A few days later, Audi pulled the curtain off another new but utterly functionless car. As people milled about the vehicle-stacked white spaces of Munich’s Die Neue Sammlung International Design Museum, I squinted at a shining wall studded with 1,800 miniature aluminum rally cars and begrudgingly considered the intersection of cars and art.
Another unambiguously car-shaped object, full-sized and covered by a dramatic white dropcloth, hovered high on the wall. The shrouded figure was the focal point of the evening and of the museum’s new permanent exhibit on vehicle design, the spooky centerpiece of the new “Audi Design Wall.” Its unveiling marked a re-opening of the museum, now a century old and home to seven collections of rare and groundbreaking objects in design. And so, between fiddling with the headphones for real-time English or Chinese translation (hey, growing markets, how ya doin’?) and eating small geometric foods off small geometric plates, we were treated to a little piece of engineered engineering history.

Dedications were made by Audi lead designer Wolfgang Egger, Dr. Ulrich Hackenberg, a technical development board member at Audi, and Dr. Florian Hufnagl, director of The Pinakothek Der Moderne (the design museum’s parent institution). Each mentioned the company’s design-minded history, the link between history and future. The spectacle was consummated as all three pressed an Audi-logoed white button, dropping the veil to reveal the star of the Audi Design Wall: a totally unexpected white dummy version of the new Sport Quattro Concept. Shocking? No. Thrilling. Slightly. Art? Maybe it was something in the geometric food, but I was potentially open to that interpretation.

Something new, something old. Something silver, something matte white to symbolize open-ended future creative development.

This institutional partnership particularly makes sense if you’re familiar with Audi’s history. As the story goes, the spark for Audi began in 1899, founded by August Horch, an engineer who quit working for Karl Benz (yes, that Benz), and then his own eponymous company, to pursue greater creative freedom and technical advancement. As in most German industries, war and a fluctuating market wreaked havoc with both the innovation and the ownership of the company, but Audi was one that survived. By the early 1930s, it was one of four companies sublimated into the massive Auto Union brand, along with Wanderer, DKW and Horsh.

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