CULTURE by Stefan Sagmeister. The book about the international cultural engagement.The BMW Group is celebrating 40 years of cultural commitment and is currently supporting more than 100 projects throughout the world. To mark this occasion, the internationally celebrated New York-based graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister has created the design of the publication CULTURE, a book describing the BMW Group’s cultural partnerships. The concept is - typical of Sagmeister - unconventional: CULTURE is not only a book to browse through, but as it also features an integrated, remote-controlled car, a book that can be driven around. The limited edition is not available for sale. Each of the 1488 copies is hand-signed and a unique specimen: As a whole, the numerical arrangement of all book covers would make a square measuring 7 x 7 metres depicting a graphically abstracted image of the legendary BMW “four cylinder” building - the company headquarters in Munich built by Karl Schwanzer in 1972 - from a bird’s eye view.

The book is divided into four parts according to the BMW Group’s main cultural activities - contemporary art, classical music and jazz, architecture and design and, finally, culture within the company. The first three chapters are each preceded by a quote by the conductor Daniel Barenboim, the artist Olafur Eliasson and the architect Zaha Hadid respectively. This is where partners from the culture communication network have their say. Containing more than 50 partly full-page colour reproductions, CULTURE also illustrates a selective overview of the spectrum of the BMW Group’s international cultural involvement.

Two-time Grammy winner Stefan Sagmeister, a native Austrian, studied in Vienna and New York. He designed prize-winning album covers for the Rolling Stones, the Talking Heads and Lou Reed, but is far more than a designer of CD covers. Whether film installation, furniture, posters or books, Sagmeister is a broadly positioned, globally operating artist. The publication “Sagmeister. Made you Look” went on to become a bestseller. In addition to the Grammy awards, he received further internationally significant design prizes such as the Lucky Strike Designer Award 2009 and the Cooper-Hewitt Communications Design Award 2005. As a result, Sagmeister has become a frequently shown designer at international galleries and museums as well. Cities that have already held individual exhibitions comprising works by Sagmeister Inc. include Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Osaka, Prague, Cologne and Seoul.

credits:

BMW Group Culture