Headlights >
Spending much of our precious time in the traffic jams it is a pleasure to watch the design of cars. Monitoring and analysing the automotive styling of the better brands makes the hours in traffic jams the most productive design time. The way headlights and backlights are embedded in the car body are of special interest to the non standard designer. After a long period of being functional lamps attached to the body, they have become integrated and active parts of the body, they have become much larger and they have become body parts, smoothly cooperating with and even emphasizing the folding lines of the body as a whole. For the BMW Ekris garage plus showroom ONL used the headlights of the new 5 series as a reference for the large glazed part rounding off the corner of the building body. The client immediately understood the concept.

BMW kidney shapes >

Seen from the A2 highway near Leidsche Rijn behind the Acoustic Barrier and the Hessing Cockpit , but seen from the commercial area itself placed in front of the Cockpit building, ONL builds two mirror-copied building volumes for BMW. The 2 volumes together form a coherent image which refers to the two kidney shaped BMW grilles with slightly tilted bars. The double curved glass facade literally rounds the corner as the headlights of the new BMW 5 series do.

Evolution of the building body >

Architects must learn from the evolution of car bodies. IN the thirties cars were still traditional coaches on top of a chassis, much like buildings are a loose set of components on top of a foundation structure. Car evolved in the forties and fifties into monocoque structures, self-sufficient structural monocoque shell, preciously folded and perforated as to integrate a variety of organs, wiring and cladding materials. Now it is the architects turn to design and build monocoque structures, coherent enough to actually pick them up and displace them without losing its structural integrity.

Architecture is structure >

In ONL`s design and manufacturing concept architecture has become one with structure. The expression of the structural monocoque integrity is at the same time the architectural expression. The design for the Ekris BMW showroom is in all styling aspects a three-dimensionally shaped volume like the modern car body itself. The construction of the two headlight buildings closely follow the architectural styling. As a consequence not a single constructive element is the same, the Ekris Headlight building is another example of non standard architecture. According to the principles of mass-customization and the unique file to factory production process as developed by ONL guarantee that the quality, the precision and the costs remain close to standard.

2005

2007