BMW Headquarters

BMW Headquarters, also known as the BMW Tower or BMW-Vierzylinder, is the corporate headquarters of BMW Group in Munich, Germany. The building stands beside Olympiapark and the BMW Museum, and was designed by Austrian architect Karl Schwanzer. With its four cylindrical sections, the tower was designed to suggest the cylinders of a car engine, making the building one of Munich’s most distinctive examples of modern corporate architecture. BMW describes the tower as 99.5 metres high, with 22 floors, and notes that it celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2022.

The futuristic look of the BMW Headquarters made it a natural filming location for 1970s cinema, especially films that needed modernist architecture to suggest power, wealth or an unsettling near future. The building is best known from Rollerball (1975) and Suspiria (1977). In both films, the real BMW identity is less important than the building’s striking visual effect: a corporate landmark turned into a piece of cinematic science fiction or nightmare architecture.

In Rollerball (1975), the BMW Headquarters appears as the headquarters of the Energy Corporation. The film uses the then-new tower and the nearby BMW Museum buildings as part of its futuristic corporate world, where global companies have replaced national governments and control society through violent entertainment. The BMW logos were removed and replaced with large orange circles, turning the Munich landmark into the face of the fictional corporation.

In Suspiria (1977), the BMW Headquarters is used for the scene where Suzy Bannion meets Dr. Mandel, played by Udo Kier, and learns more about the sinister history of the dance academy. The cold, modern concrete-and-glass setting contrasts strongly with the gothic, fairy-tale design of the academy, making the meeting feel like a brief step into another world before the film returns to its more nightmarish spaces.

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