BMW Central Building

Each one anxious not to be left behind now that the rest of the profession has seen in undeniable built form what her office is capable of delivering on schedule and within a working budget.

The BMW central building rising in Leipzig, Germany, a factory administration building where she has proposed something almost as radical in its own register as Cincinnati.

A central spine that cuts diagonally through the structure and allows the assembly line itself to become visible, woven directly through the offices of the executives who oversee it, moves forward with a client newly confident that the ambition on the drawings will in fact resolve into a building that works.

In Austria, the ski jump above Innsbruck reaches completion in the same period.

It has to.

What had been, for three decades, essentially one designer supported by a small, devoted team becomes, over the course of just a few years following the Pritzker, something closer to a global design and engineering practice, staffed increasingly by architects with backgrounds in structural engineering, computational design, and construction management, disciplines that a practice focused on paper competitions had never particularly needed, but that a practice building simultaneously on four continents cannot function without.

Among the commissions that arrive in this period of transformation, one in particular becomes the proving ground for everything the expanded studio is capable of: the BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany.

The commission had actually been secured slightly before the Pritzker announcement, part of a broader plan by the German automaker to build a new manufacturing plant in the former East Germany, in a city working hard to reestablish itself as an industrial center after reunification.