In just a short time, BMW Welt has become one of the most popular tourist attractions in Munich. Around five million people have visited BMW Welt since it opened in October 2007. With two million visitors a year, it is now number one in the list of Munich's most visited sights. With its unique features – the striking double cone and the flying cloud roof – this unusual structure is one of the first creations in a new generation of communication buildings for the 21st century. At the same time. BMW Welt is harmoniously integrated into the context of the Olympic Park architecture and the existing BMW buildings. The open architecture and transparent, complex glass facade allow lots of light into the interior space and open up the building to its environment.
The BMW Welt complex – consisting of BMW Welt, the BMW Museum and the BMW plant – provides a fascinating diversity of themes in one place and creates a brand experience that is unique throughout the world.
The recipe for the success of this experience is based on its wide-ranging diversity and regularly changing exhibitions and central themes. BMW Welt thus combines technology, design and innovation with lifestyle, dynamism and culture, acting as a public space for fascinating encounters and dialogues. In 2010, BMW Welt will once again be thrilling its guests with its very diverse programme of events.
January saw the start of the six lunchtime events to select the winner of the BMW Welt Jazz Award. The high point of this well-established cultural format will be the finals on 17 April. The popular "Mobility Tour" and "Family Time" will be taking place again in 2010, along with the many different guided tours through BMW Welt, which particularly meet the needs of families. And to end the year 2010 in classic style, concerts featuring top artistes are traditionally held in BMW Welt every Advent Sunday.
In 2010, in addition to the permanent exhibition, the BMW Museum will also be showing the BMW Concept Cars and the BMW Art Car created by the South African artist Esther Mahlangu as part of the world-famous BMW Art Car Collection will be moving into the BMW Museum in May.
Thanks to the new Production Mile, the BMW plant will once again be able to grant 150,000 visitors a glimpse of all the BMW production areas.
The re-opening of the BMW Museum in June 2008 marked the fulfilment of a dream that started with the concept for BMW Welt, the gateway to the brand. This is where the BMW plant tours start, and the BMW Museum opposite is connected directly with BMW Welt via a bridge. With BMW Welt, the BMW plant and the BMW Museum, visitors can experience every facet of the brand. Here, the authenticity and continuity, brand history and innovative production and technologies of BMW become tangible.
BMW Welt 2010. Full of new ideas and a widely varied programme of events.
With the BMW Welt Jazz Award 2009, the BMW Group last year launched a Europe-wide competition, highly respected within the jazz scene and beyond, that provides musicians with a demanding yet exclusive platform. In 2010, the BMW Welt Jazz Award will be entering its second phase, featuring the oldest, most authentic and perhaps most beautiful of musical instruments: the human voice. With the motto "Voices in Jazz", soloists backed by a small ensemble will be competing for the coveted trophy. After the sixth lunchtime concert, the jury will name the two finalists. The two ensembles will then compete against each other in the final concert on 17 April 2010. The BMW Welt Jazz Award 2010 (offering prize money totalling € 15,000) will be presented to the winners after the concert.
BMW Welt will be hosting a dazzling array of events for the public in 2010. In the BMW Museum and BMW Welt, the last Sunday in the month is set aside for families. Reduced entrance charges on Family Sunday, free guided tours, regularly changing workshops and shows guarantee an exciting, varied range of entertainment for young and old, large and small. Every day, visitors from all over the world are amazed by spectacular motor cycle stunts. And there's more: a Poetry Slam, Improtheater, Science Show with Joachim Bublath, WII Sports Weeks, Carnival Brazil, Dance Festival, are all up-and-coming events this year.
In addition to regularly changing exhibition of BMW technology, design and innovation, visitors are particularly fascinated by the unusual, prize-winning architecture of the building. The guided tours are therefore very popular. One of the innovations here is the BMW Premium Tour, which links the whole world BMW together: the highlights of the BMW Museum, the most interesting parts of the BMW plant and the most important areas of BMW Welt. And the Junior Campus at BMW Welt will also be offering new services in 2010, in addition to its extremely popular workshops, so that it can meet future demands and the needs of families in particular. On the first Sunday in every month, the Junior Campus at BMW Welt focuses completely on families. The special Family Time activities allow parents to experience the theme of mobility with their children. In the Junior Campus, which was designed specially for young visitors, parents can visit the "Discover Mobility" workshop with their children for the first time on these days, or get to know BMW Welt in every detail in two different tours. Whilst parents take a BMW Welt Compact Tour, the "Mobility Tour" invites children and young people aged 7 to 13, after a research session in the Junior Campus, to go on an exciting tour through BMW Welt, accompanied by trained teaching staff. The tour focuses on general mobility matters, such as methods of transport, covering distances, safety on the roads and pioneering technologies and environmental aspects.
BMW Museum 2010. Changing exhibitions, special exhibitions and new Art Cars.
Ever since it opened in 1973, the "Museum dish", as it is known, has been not only the home of the BMW Museum but also one of the city's prime architectural landmarks. Following its redesign and re-opening in June 2008, the directly adjacent flat structure of the BMW corporate head office has been added to the "Museum dish". It has thus been possible to quintuple the size of the exhibition space to 5,000 m2. A system of apparently weightless ramps reaching dynamically into space leads visitors on a thematic journey to a total of 25 exhibition areas. Visitors move along this pathway as if they were on a street, walking along the paved pathways of a great city.
The new exhibition concept does not focus on history as a complete chronology, but instead develops themes in the form of time lines, which start in the past, lead into the present and offer glimpses of the future. Different media and production settings are used to present these time lines and allow them to be experienced with the senses. 120 original BMW exhibits from the last 90 years of BMW history demonstrate this very clearly and invite visitors on a personal journey through time. Great favourites with the public that can now be viewed in the new BMW Museum include the Isetta, the BMW 2002, the R32 motorcycle, the BMW 328 or the 507, and also the H2R record-breaker. Cars, motorcycles, racing vehicles and aeroplane engines demonstrate the brand's product diversity, continuity and innovative power. To meet the high international standards of the BMW Museum, many exhibits have been comprehensively and accurately restored. At the end of the tour, visitors arrive at the topmost platform of the "Museum dish", where they are greeting a yet another synthesis of architecture and media production techniques – a panoramic projection across the inner wall of the dish.
In the unusual space, without columns, with a wall surface that is 120 m long and up to 6 m high, specially produced films are shown as a 360° panoramic view.
The museum's educational service – "Teaching with the BMW Museum“ – concentrates on programmes for schools consisting of themed tours followed by an artistic and practical programme section. Factual knowledge takes second place to a wide range of different learning processes. On this basis, the Museum offers schools and children's and youth's groups guided tours and workshops for 6- to 13-year-olds and 14- to 18-year-olds.
BMW Museum 2010. Changing exhibitions, special exhibitions and new Art Cars.
The current temporary exhibition shows BMW Concept Vehicles on a scale never before seen by the public. The exhibits, dating from the Thirties to 2009, are unique and bear witness to pioneering innovations in terms of design, materials, drive technologies and safety. They stand apart from any series developments, give shape to new ideas and visions and have often proved to be the stimulus for the kind of individual mobility that comes the day after tomorrow. Because of its great popularity, this exhibition will continue to be presented in the Museum dish until May 2009. After this, until August 2010, the BMW Museum will be presenting the touring exhibition "Museums in the 21st Century. Ideas, Projects, Buildings", which was created by Suzanne and Thierry Greub at the Art Centre Basel. It focuses on 27 different museum projects developed by famous architects. The exhibition is illustrated by models, images, graphic elements and plans.
There will also be a new special exhibition in 2010. From May 2010, the colourful BMW Art Car designed by the South African artist Esther Mahlangu will be on display. In addition, as the home of the BMW Art Car Collection, the Museum is being presented with a significant addition in the form of the BMW Art Car created by the British artist David Hockney.
The opening times have changed: From March 2010, the BMW Museum is open continuously from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday.
BMW Plant. Passionate workers in harmony with cutting-edge technology.
In the main BMW plant in Munich, visitors can experience the fascination of modern automobile construction at close quarters. The new BMW Production Mile runs through a total of twelve halls, covering all areas of production from the pressing plant, through body shell building, the paint shop, engine construction to the production of the interiors and seats and on to assembly. Visitors can witness the unique logistics and precise attention to detail here. 10,000 parts from all over the world have to meet up with each other here at the right time and in the right place. This incredibly complex process takes place at this historic BMW location in a harmonious interplay between man and machines. The factory tour starts with the perfectly coordinated "robots' dance", which amazes visitors with the sheer aesthetic appeal of the technology. The tolerance level in body shell construction is a tenth of a millimetre, reaching a thousandth of a millimetre in engine construction.
Visitors will then see the majority of the 9,000 or so employees from 50 countries working in Assembly, where a completely individual automobile, tailored to the customer's wishes, is put together. Because apart from fleet orders, Plant no. I in Munich only makes on average two to four identical vehicles a year, even though a new BMW is created every minute here.
BMW factory tour. 1.5 million visitors and eight million automobiles.
There have been factory tours for almost as long as there has been a BMW main plant in Munich – for almost 90 years. In the early years, the tours tended to be run on a more spontaneous, flexible basis, but the factory tours became more formal in the 1950s, mainly for employees, to start with. The earliest source in the BMW Archive to refer to factory visits dates from 1962. It was only at the beginning of the 70s that the plant began to count the number of visitors, and in these early years of records, the number of guests each year was between 30,000 and 33,000. From the end of the 80s, this number was supplemented by the visitors who collected their new cars "ex factory" in the small delivery warehouse in Freimann, for which BMW Welt was created in 2007. The mainly US guests increased the average number of visitors to 35,000 – 40,000 a year. Because visitors were still provided with factory clothing because they moved through between the production systems, the maximum capacity for visits to the plant was soon filled, and requests for visits had to be submitted months in advance.
Since the opening of BMW Welt in October 2007 and the redesign of the factory tour, the main plant has been welcoming 150,000 visitors a year – and has far more requests for visits. It is recommended that visitors book six months in advance. In a conservative estimate, the workers at the BMW plant in Munich have had over 1.5 million visitors looking over their shoulders as they have built around eight million cars – more than any other BMW plant.
Guided tours through the BMW Welt experiences can be booked by telephone each day from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. by calling: +49 (0) 180 2 118822 (6 cents per call from German landlines, maximum 42 cents per minute from German mobile networks) or by mailing the BMW Welt Info Service at: infowelt@bmw-welt.com.
Further information about the wide range of facilities can be obtained from: www.bmw-welt.com
The BMW Welt complex – consisting of BMW Welt, the BMW Museum and the BMW plant – provides a fascinating diversity of themes in one place and creates a brand experience that is unique throughout the world.
The recipe for the success of this experience is based on its wide-ranging diversity and regularly changing exhibitions and central themes. BMW Welt thus combines technology, design and innovation with lifestyle, dynamism and culture, acting as a public space for fascinating encounters and dialogues. In 2010, BMW Welt will once again be thrilling its guests with its very diverse programme of events.
January saw the start of the six lunchtime events to select the winner of the BMW Welt Jazz Award. The high point of this well-established cultural format will be the finals on 17 April. The popular "Mobility Tour" and "Family Time" will be taking place again in 2010, along with the many different guided tours through BMW Welt, which particularly meet the needs of families. And to end the year 2010 in classic style, concerts featuring top artistes are traditionally held in BMW Welt every Advent Sunday.
In 2010, in addition to the permanent exhibition, the BMW Museum will also be showing the BMW Concept Cars and the BMW Art Car created by the South African artist Esther Mahlangu as part of the world-famous BMW Art Car Collection will be moving into the BMW Museum in May.
Thanks to the new Production Mile, the BMW plant will once again be able to grant 150,000 visitors a glimpse of all the BMW production areas.
The re-opening of the BMW Museum in June 2008 marked the fulfilment of a dream that started with the concept for BMW Welt, the gateway to the brand. This is where the BMW plant tours start, and the BMW Museum opposite is connected directly with BMW Welt via a bridge. With BMW Welt, the BMW plant and the BMW Museum, visitors can experience every facet of the brand. Here, the authenticity and continuity, brand history and innovative production and technologies of BMW become tangible.
BMW Welt 2010. Full of new ideas and a widely varied programme of events.
With the BMW Welt Jazz Award 2009, the BMW Group last year launched a Europe-wide competition, highly respected within the jazz scene and beyond, that provides musicians with a demanding yet exclusive platform. In 2010, the BMW Welt Jazz Award will be entering its second phase, featuring the oldest, most authentic and perhaps most beautiful of musical instruments: the human voice. With the motto "Voices in Jazz", soloists backed by a small ensemble will be competing for the coveted trophy. After the sixth lunchtime concert, the jury will name the two finalists. The two ensembles will then compete against each other in the final concert on 17 April 2010. The BMW Welt Jazz Award 2010 (offering prize money totalling € 15,000) will be presented to the winners after the concert.
BMW Welt will be hosting a dazzling array of events for the public in 2010. In the BMW Museum and BMW Welt, the last Sunday in the month is set aside for families. Reduced entrance charges on Family Sunday, free guided tours, regularly changing workshops and shows guarantee an exciting, varied range of entertainment for young and old, large and small. Every day, visitors from all over the world are amazed by spectacular motor cycle stunts. And there's more: a Poetry Slam, Improtheater, Science Show with Joachim Bublath, WII Sports Weeks, Carnival Brazil, Dance Festival, are all up-and-coming events this year.
In addition to regularly changing exhibition of BMW technology, design and innovation, visitors are particularly fascinated by the unusual, prize-winning architecture of the building. The guided tours are therefore very popular. One of the innovations here is the BMW Premium Tour, which links the whole world BMW together: the highlights of the BMW Museum, the most interesting parts of the BMW plant and the most important areas of BMW Welt. And the Junior Campus at BMW Welt will also be offering new services in 2010, in addition to its extremely popular workshops, so that it can meet future demands and the needs of families in particular. On the first Sunday in every month, the Junior Campus at BMW Welt focuses completely on families. The special Family Time activities allow parents to experience the theme of mobility with their children. In the Junior Campus, which was designed specially for young visitors, parents can visit the "Discover Mobility" workshop with their children for the first time on these days, or get to know BMW Welt in every detail in two different tours. Whilst parents take a BMW Welt Compact Tour, the "Mobility Tour" invites children and young people aged 7 to 13, after a research session in the Junior Campus, to go on an exciting tour through BMW Welt, accompanied by trained teaching staff. The tour focuses on general mobility matters, such as methods of transport, covering distances, safety on the roads and pioneering technologies and environmental aspects.
BMW Museum 2010. Changing exhibitions, special exhibitions and new Art Cars.
Ever since it opened in 1973, the "Museum dish", as it is known, has been not only the home of the BMW Museum but also one of the city's prime architectural landmarks. Following its redesign and re-opening in June 2008, the directly adjacent flat structure of the BMW corporate head office has been added to the "Museum dish". It has thus been possible to quintuple the size of the exhibition space to 5,000 m2. A system of apparently weightless ramps reaching dynamically into space leads visitors on a thematic journey to a total of 25 exhibition areas. Visitors move along this pathway as if they were on a street, walking along the paved pathways of a great city.
The new exhibition concept does not focus on history as a complete chronology, but instead develops themes in the form of time lines, which start in the past, lead into the present and offer glimpses of the future. Different media and production settings are used to present these time lines and allow them to be experienced with the senses. 120 original BMW exhibits from the last 90 years of BMW history demonstrate this very clearly and invite visitors on a personal journey through time. Great favourites with the public that can now be viewed in the new BMW Museum include the Isetta, the BMW 2002, the R32 motorcycle, the BMW 328 or the 507, and also the H2R record-breaker. Cars, motorcycles, racing vehicles and aeroplane engines demonstrate the brand's product diversity, continuity and innovative power. To meet the high international standards of the BMW Museum, many exhibits have been comprehensively and accurately restored. At the end of the tour, visitors arrive at the topmost platform of the "Museum dish", where they are greeting a yet another synthesis of architecture and media production techniques – a panoramic projection across the inner wall of the dish.
In the unusual space, without columns, with a wall surface that is 120 m long and up to 6 m high, specially produced films are shown as a 360° panoramic view.
The museum's educational service – "Teaching with the BMW Museum“ – concentrates on programmes for schools consisting of themed tours followed by an artistic and practical programme section. Factual knowledge takes second place to a wide range of different learning processes. On this basis, the Museum offers schools and children's and youth's groups guided tours and workshops for 6- to 13-year-olds and 14- to 18-year-olds.
BMW Museum 2010. Changing exhibitions, special exhibitions and new Art Cars.
The current temporary exhibition shows BMW Concept Vehicles on a scale never before seen by the public. The exhibits, dating from the Thirties to 2009, are unique and bear witness to pioneering innovations in terms of design, materials, drive technologies and safety. They stand apart from any series developments, give shape to new ideas and visions and have often proved to be the stimulus for the kind of individual mobility that comes the day after tomorrow. Because of its great popularity, this exhibition will continue to be presented in the Museum dish until May 2009. After this, until August 2010, the BMW Museum will be presenting the touring exhibition "Museums in the 21st Century. Ideas, Projects, Buildings", which was created by Suzanne and Thierry Greub at the Art Centre Basel. It focuses on 27 different museum projects developed by famous architects. The exhibition is illustrated by models, images, graphic elements and plans.
There will also be a new special exhibition in 2010. From May 2010, the colourful BMW Art Car designed by the South African artist Esther Mahlangu will be on display. In addition, as the home of the BMW Art Car Collection, the Museum is being presented with a significant addition in the form of the BMW Art Car created by the British artist David Hockney.
The opening times have changed: From March 2010, the BMW Museum is open continuously from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday.
BMW Plant. Passionate workers in harmony with cutting-edge technology.
In the main BMW plant in Munich, visitors can experience the fascination of modern automobile construction at close quarters. The new BMW Production Mile runs through a total of twelve halls, covering all areas of production from the pressing plant, through body shell building, the paint shop, engine construction to the production of the interiors and seats and on to assembly. Visitors can witness the unique logistics and precise attention to detail here. 10,000 parts from all over the world have to meet up with each other here at the right time and in the right place. This incredibly complex process takes place at this historic BMW location in a harmonious interplay between man and machines. The factory tour starts with the perfectly coordinated "robots' dance", which amazes visitors with the sheer aesthetic appeal of the technology. The tolerance level in body shell construction is a tenth of a millimetre, reaching a thousandth of a millimetre in engine construction.
Visitors will then see the majority of the 9,000 or so employees from 50 countries working in Assembly, where a completely individual automobile, tailored to the customer's wishes, is put together. Because apart from fleet orders, Plant no. I in Munich only makes on average two to four identical vehicles a year, even though a new BMW is created every minute here.
BMW factory tour. 1.5 million visitors and eight million automobiles.
There have been factory tours for almost as long as there has been a BMW main plant in Munich – for almost 90 years. In the early years, the tours tended to be run on a more spontaneous, flexible basis, but the factory tours became more formal in the 1950s, mainly for employees, to start with. The earliest source in the BMW Archive to refer to factory visits dates from 1962. It was only at the beginning of the 70s that the plant began to count the number of visitors, and in these early years of records, the number of guests each year was between 30,000 and 33,000. From the end of the 80s, this number was supplemented by the visitors who collected their new cars "ex factory" in the small delivery warehouse in Freimann, for which BMW Welt was created in 2007. The mainly US guests increased the average number of visitors to 35,000 – 40,000 a year. Because visitors were still provided with factory clothing because they moved through between the production systems, the maximum capacity for visits to the plant was soon filled, and requests for visits had to be submitted months in advance.
Since the opening of BMW Welt in October 2007 and the redesign of the factory tour, the main plant has been welcoming 150,000 visitors a year – and has far more requests for visits. It is recommended that visitors book six months in advance. In a conservative estimate, the workers at the BMW plant in Munich have had over 1.5 million visitors looking over their shoulders as they have built around eight million cars – more than any other BMW plant.
Guided tours through the BMW Welt experiences can be booked by telephone each day from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. by calling: +49 (0) 180 2 118822 (6 cents per call from German landlines, maximum 42 cents per minute from German mobile networks) or by mailing the BMW Welt Info Service at: infowelt@bmw-welt.com.
Further information about the wide range of facilities can be obtained from: www.bmw-welt.com
