Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R project

As part of its BMW H2R research project, Studio Olafur Eliasson is preparing a dense publication comprising extensive visual material; excerpts from two seminars held in 2006/07; and conversations between Olafur Eliasson and a number of distinguished thinkers, such as architect and artist Yona Friedman, urban theorist Bart Lootsma, and Head of Design BMW Christopher Bangle.

In the research project, Eliasson raises questions of formgiving and materiality, mobility, temporality, movement, and renewable energy. The aim is not so much to examine the car as object, as to integrate the vehicle in a complex set of social, historical, political, and economic relations.

In 2005 a BMW H2R hydrogen-powered vehicle was delivered to Studio Olafur Eliasson and then stripped bare of its outer shell. To create a new skin several form studies have been carried out in a temporary geodesic dome, constructed in the yard of the studio. The final surface of the car consists of layers of ice, frozen around two intricate nets, mirrored plates and light. The “Climate car” can only exist in a microclimate with a temperature of minus 6 degrees Celsius or below.