Christopher Edward Bangle

Bob Zuleger’s drafting room heard it early: freshman or sophomore, the kid said he was going to be a car designer. “Yeah, sure kid.”

He was born in Ravenna, Ohio, on October 14, 1956, and raised in Wausau. At Wausau West from 1972 to 1975 he went to midget races at the Wisconsin Valley Fair, ruined a 1960s Karmann Ghia into what he later called a horrific dune buggy, lettered communion Bibles in old Germanic script for the church, and took a summer job as a technical draughtsman at seventeen. He also thought he might become a Methodist minister. After Wisconsin he went to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Opel interiors and Fiat design work—the Coupé, the Alfa 145—led to Munich on October 1, 1992: the first American to run BMW Group design across BMW, MINI, and Rolls-Royce. The E65 7 Series rear end started petitions; Time later put that car on a “50 worst” list, yet it became the best-selling 7 Series to that point, and BMW passed Mercedes in premium volume on his watch. He called the surfaces a revolutionary generation after an evolutionary one and told critics to see the cars in person. He did not coin “flame surfacing”—a journalist did—and has pointed to Frank Gehry as an influence. GINA, a fabric-skinned BMW concept in 2008, closed the Munich decade.

He left in 2009 for a studio in Clavesana near Turin, designed a Hennessy bottle and an electric oddity called REDS, and never really stopped being the West kid who had already picked a life. His favorite boyhood book, he told the Wausau Daily Herald, was Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay; he likened designing a car to a Lombardi season. Ohio is the birthplace; Wausau is the raising and the high-school claim.