The sacred cylinder of Munich

Munich is a city of altars. Altars consecrated to painting, to thought, to beer, and to football . There is the classical altar of the Alte Pinakothek, where Rubens stretches like a pagan god. There is the modern altar of the Neue Pinakothek, with its flammable Van Goghs . And there is, of course, the secular altar of the Allianz Arena, that secular mosque where Müller transforms into a Bavarian shepherd and Harry Kane plays Wittelsbach in cleats. But if one seeks the liturgy of modernity, if one wants to commune with progress, the true Munich sanctuary is the BMW Museum.

It matters little that it's sandwiched between the headquarters tower and the Olympic Park. The building isn't on display, it levitates . Its architecture isn't functional, it's theological. The BMW Museum presents itself as a suspended cylinder, a time capsule in which engineering becomes a mystical experience. No marble or baroque angels. Here, the relics are shaped like engines. Here, metal is incensed. Here, prayers are said in V12.

What sets the BMW Museum apart from its Munich counterparts—the Lenbachhaus and its collection of Expressionists, the Deutsches Museum and its encyclopedic obsessions—is not just the content, but the nature of the cult. The visitor doesn't contemplate. They engage. The museography is kinetic. The cars are displayed as if they were weightless Calder sculptures : in motion, suspended, suggesting speeds the viewer won't see, but will feel.

There are no paintings. There are curves. There are no speeches. There are roars. You can look face to face with a 507 that looks like an aluminum panther. You can caress the M1 coupé with your eyes as if you were witnessing the resurrection of a Greek myth with a Bavarian license plate. And you can understand, without the need for an audio guide, why the car is much more than a means of transportation: it's an ideology.

The BMW Museum is also a form of refined megalomania. It doesn't aim to please everyone. It doesn't aim to be pedagogical. It aims to amaze. It's not about explaining Germany's industrial progress. It's about exhibiting it as a total art form. Like a Gesamtkunstwerk where technology, design, advertising, and engineering merge into a religion without dogma , but with emblems: the blue and white logo, the acronyms that make the enthusiast salivate, the motorcycles that defy gravitational logic. And the most disturbing thing is that one leaves there convinced. Convinced that beauty can be found in a chrome exhaust. That the future—that German fetish—doesn't lie in algorithms or laboratories, but in an 8-series that slumbers like a panther under the neon lights.

Is it art ? Is it technology ? Is it Teutonic narcissism? The BMW Museum doesn't answer. It only exhibits. It only dazzles. It only proves that in Munich you can venerate Kandinsky without ceasing to love a roadster. That aesthetics are also accelerating. And that, deep down, Bavarians have always known how to design cathedrals, even if they now dedicate them to horsepower.

A visit to the BMW Museum doesn't happen. It unfolds like a chase. There's a certain suspense in every turn , as if the building itself were breathing in time with a piston. There are no pompous displays or automotive history lessons. The story is suggested, outlined with the same arrogance displayed by the coupes in their display cases, as if nothing needed to be justified. It's the viewer who falls short. The one who needs time to process such aesthetic insolence . Because here, time doesn't advance: it accelerates.

And not even the merchandising betrays the atmosphere. Far from the vulgarity of museum shops, the BMW lifestyle blends in with the architecture: neat, minimalist, functional. Keychains are sold as if they were talismans, backpacks as if they were orbital backpacks, polo shirts as if they were designed by Dieter Rams . Everything suggests that the museum doesn't end at the exit. That one hasn't visited a building, but rather entered a mindset. A way of being in the world that combines the precision of a stopwatch with the arrogance of a limitless highway. And which, above all, celebrates an exquisite heresy: that of turning the engine into art.