Not too long ago the glimpse of a hood ornament or the flash of a grill was all it took to identify a car’s make, model, and year. The reality is much different today—it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the homogeny clogging America’s pockmarked streets. Chris Bangle, head of design for BMW, is trying to change this notion. Though his work has met some resistance, Bangle is bringing beauty and craft back to the automotive vernacular.

A curve here, an angle there may seem inconsequential, but spurring a new discussion in the industry is no small accomplishment. Taste after all, is subjective, but the success of Bangle’s expressive style has inspired a trend, and the market has become increasingly crowded with designs trying to push the envelope in their own way. We caught up with Bangle to discuss art, religion, and cars—which as it turns out, are sometimes one and the same.

Tell us how the current BMW design language came about?

In the late 90’s we addressed the sustainability of our brand, and what that meant in terms of design cycles. We realized we needed to do more than just a simple evolution of one vocabulary. We needed to be able to expand the basis of forms and identities to encompass new kinds of products. In 2001 at the Detroit Motor Show, we unveiled the X-Coupe, which has very avant-garde surfacing. It was a breakthrough car for expressionism in the automotive category.

It’s a very sculptural style. Did you draw on fine art, artists, or architecture for inspiration?

There has been a huge amount of influence from the Futurists, but rather inadvertently. I think their ideology had been present in my team for years, and we just hadn’t seen it; hadn’t confronted ourselves with it. It wasn’t like we put up a picture of Boccioni’s sculptures and said ok, let’s do a car that looks like that. It was actually the other way around.

We designed the cars with the thought that they could be expressive. We tried to look at surfacing from another point of view. I don’t profess to know anything about art, but I’m interested in relationships and why change happens. Art to me is a fantastic field because it’s available for analysis and full of so many cross-cultural references.

Our issue is: What is the dynamic of life? What is the dynamic of visual forms?

Is it true you studied to become a Methodist minister?

(Laughs) Yea, sure.

How did you transition into design from such a different place?

I joined the dark side of the force. I went to the University of Wisconsin in my hometown with the intention of going to seminary. So I took all of the classes that were pre-seminary, which were almost all humanist classes, no math or anything like that. And then I went to Art Center. I always loved drawing cars and suddenly discovered there was this college I had never heard of before.

So I sent off a portfolio and got accepted—and wow, how amazing right? It shifted me. Once I was at Art Center I got caught up in the fever of design and there was no letting go. Later when I became a design manager, I discovered that all the things I learned in those humanity courses in Wisconsin about philosophy, literature, critique, and psychology were exactly what design management is all about. There’s almost a one to one paradigm between how you write and critique literature, and how you design and critique cars.

What are the parallels between design and literature critique and management?

If you reflect on some of the aspects involved with critical writing and analysis, there are some game rules to play by, which expand our awareness and understanding of why we have these rules to begin with. If you look at car design in a similar way and understand that there are some dogmatic things that we like to carry around with ourselves, and the more you let yourself be burdened by them, the more limited you’ll be.