A BMW roundel 40 metres across lies on the roof of a concrete bowl in Munich, and it can be read only from above. Karl Schwanzer drew the bowl as the company’s museum, beside the four suspended cylinders of its headquarters, and both opened on 18 May 1973. Inside, a road of ramps and bridges winds for a kilometre through a century of BMW, from the first motorcycle to the roadster Elvis Presley drove as a soldier in Germany.
The museum keeps the stories that made the company, and one it long left untold. A motorcycle drawn in a few weeks set the pattern BMW has built ever since. One man won with the 328 in its very first race and, a year later, rode faster than anyone would ride a motorcycle for the next 14 years. A white roadster turned red because its owner’s admirers wrote on it in lipstick, disappeared for half a century and came home without its engine. And in one room, the company sets out how it used the labour of concentration camp prisoners during the war.
In Brief
- The museum opened on 18 May 1973, together with the BMW headquarters beside it; the Viennese architect Karl Schwanzer designed both.
- It closed in 2004 for a redesign by Atelier Brückner and reopened on 21 June 2008 with five times its former exhibition space.
- A route of about one kilometre leads through 25 areas in seven exhibition houses, on 5,000 square metres.
- Around 125 original exhibits are on show: cars, motorcycles, aircraft engines and racing engines.
- The museum and the headquarters have been listed buildings since 1999.
- In 2025 the museum received more than 847,000 visitors, the most in its history.
History
BMW kept a museum before it had a building for one. A factory museum opened at the Munich plant in 1966, and in the late 1960s the Board of Management decided to build a museum for the company as a whole, beside the new headquarters it was planning at the edge of Munich’s Olympic site. Karl Schwanzer of Vienna won the competition. His tower was chosen over a conventional block of seven storeys, and on 2 December 1968 the museum joined it in the same contract. Ground was broken on 28 July 1970, while the city built its park for the Games of 1972.
The headquarters is a paradox in steel and concrete. Its four cylinders do not stand on the ground. They hang from a cross of steel on the roof, carried by a central core 99.5 metres high, and 16,800 tonnes of building are held in suspension. The highest floors were built first, at ground level, then raised hydraulically at about four metres a week, so that the tower went up from the top down. It was finished in the summer of the Games, and at their opening BMW hung roundels of canvas on its east and west faces, where the crowds in the Olympic Stadium could see them.
The museum at its foot is a bowl of thin concrete, 40 metres across at the roof, and Schwanzer conceived its interior as streets and squares. A spiral ramp carried visitors down past five round platforms that seemed to float, and the roundel on the roof was drawn for no one on the ground. The tower and the bowl opened together on 18 May 1973. In 1999 both were listed.
In 2004 the museum closed for four years. Atelier Brückner of Stuttgart joined the bowl to the low building beside it and added what it called bridges and houses: seven exhibition houses with facades of their own, linked by ramps that reach into the space as if they weighed nothing, over floors of asphalt. The museum reopened on 21 June 2008 with five times the room it had before, and the bowl that had once held the whole museum was given to its temporary exhibitions.
The Collection
The first story the museum corrects is the one on every bonnet. The roundel is not a propeller. It began as the emblem of Rapp Motorenwerke, the aircraft engine maker that became BMW in 1917, with the blue and white of Bavaria set into its quarters, in reverse order because trademark law did not allow the state’s own. The propeller came later, from an advertisement at the end of the 1920s that showed the roundel turning on an aircraft. BMW’s own archive director has called the result a self-propagating myth, and the House of the Company tells where it was born.
The first BMW motorcycle was drawn in a few weeks. Max Friz and his team built the R 32 in 1923 from parts that were not new in themselves: a flat-twin engine set across the frame, its cylinders standing out into the cooling air, and a shaft in place of a chain to drive the rear wheel. The British ABC had used the engine layout before. What was new was the whole, and BMW has built motorcycles to that pattern ever since. The House of the Motorcycle follows it from Munich, where BMW built motorcycles until 1969, to Berlin-Spandau, and through the R 90 S that Hans A. Muth styled in 1973: at 200 km/h, one of the fastest motorcycles of its day.
Ernst Henne is the thread between two of the museum’s stories. On 14 June 1936 he won the two-litre class in the first race of the BMW 328, the Eifelrennen at the Nürburgring, and the 328 went on to win across Europe before the war. On 28 November 1937, on a closed stretch of autobahn near Frankfurt, he rode a fully faired, supercharged BMW of 493 cc at 279.503 km/h. It was the last of his records, and no one rode a motorcycle faster until 1951. The machine he rode, known as the World Record Machine, stands in the House of Motorsport, not far from the 328.
One car in the museum came home without its engine. On 20 December 1958, a 23-year-old soldier of the United States Army, serving in Germany, took delivery of a white BMW 507, chassis 70079. His name was Elvis Presley. His admirers wrote on the white paint in lipstick, so he had the car painted red, and after he left Germany it passed through other hands. By 1968 it belonged to Jack Castor, who kept it for decades, meaning to restore it; by then its engine and gearbox were gone. BMW Group Classic bought it in 2014, showed it in the museum as it had been found, then spent almost two years returning it to the day of delivery: Feather White, with its 150 hp aluminium V8 rebuilt to the original specification. It was first shown at Pebble Beach on 21 August 2016. It stands in the House of Technology.
Somewhere in the museum there is always at least one Art Car, and it changes. The idea came from Hervé Poulain, a French auctioneer who also raced, who in 1975 asked Alexander Calder to paint the BMW 3.0 CSL he would drive at Le Mans. Calder laid bands of colour diagonally across the bonnet, the doors and the wings. The car retired from the race, and a collection began that Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol joined in the years that followed. Robert Rauschenberg, who painted one too, put the idea in five words: drivable museums would be great.
The House of Technology argues with objects rather than words. Its lightweight construction area shows a chassis that one person can lift, and its engine gallery is a hall of the company’s first trade, for BMW built aircraft engines before it built anything else. In the House of Motorsport, the touring cars carry their records lightly: the 3.0 CSL, and the first M3, of the E30 generation, which by BMW’s count won some 1,500 races and 60 national championships, more than any other touring car.
By BMW’s own account, its museum is one of the oldest automobile museums in Germany, and it was conceived as architecture from the start: in the same commission as the headquarters, at the edge of the Olympic Park. Listed with the tower since 1999, it is as much a document of Munich in the years of the Games as a museum of the company.
It is also candid about the years most company museums pass over. Its Place of Remembrance traces the path from the armament contracts of the 1930s to the exploitation of concentration camp prisoners, held in satellite camps at the company’s own works, during the war. BMW presents it as part of coming to terms with those crimes after a long silence. It gives the rest of the museum its weight.
And it is visited as few museums are: more than 847,000 people came in 2025, the most in its history.
Visitor Experience
The approach is part of the exhibit. The four cylinders of the headquarters rise at the edge of the Olympic Park, the silver bowl sits at their foot, and across Lerchenauer Straße a bridge of almost 93 metres leads from BMW Welt, the hall where new cars are handed to their owners. Seen together, they are the company’s idea of itself, built in concrete, steel and glass.
Inside, the museum is laid out as a city. The floors are asphalt, the houses have facades, and the ramps climb between them, so that each new room is reached as a square is reached, from the street. In the House of Design, 714 metal spheres hang on steel wires from motors that move each one on its own. Over seven minutes they pass from disorder through a sequence of competing forms to the profile of a car. It is worth waiting for the end. Further on, a stair descends into the treasure chamber, where the designs that shaped the company’s cars and motorcycles are kept together.
Give the museum half a day. With BMW Welt across the bridge and the Munich plant beside it, which can be seen only on a guided tour booked well ahead, the stop becomes a full day: the history, the delivery hall and the production line of one maker, within a short walk of each other.
Climate
| Month | High °C | Low °C | Rainfall mm | Rainy days | Daylight h |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 4° | −3° | 69 | 13 | 8.9 |
| February | 5° | −3° | 60 | 12 | 10.2 |
| March | 10° | 0° | 77 | 14 | 11.9 |
| April | 14° | 4° | 72 | 13 | 13.7 |
| May | 18° | 9° | 114 | 16 | 15.2 |
| June | 22° | 12° | 114 | 16 | 16.0 |
| July | 23° | 14° | 111 | 15 | 15.6 |
| August | 23° | 14° | 106 | 14 | 14.3 |
| September | 19° | 10° | 88 | 13 | 12.6 |
| October | 14° | 6° | 74 | 12 | 10.8 |
| November | 8° | 1° | 68 | 11 | 9.3 |
| December | 4° | −2° | 74 | 14 | 8.4 |
Monthly averages for München, DE, 1991–2020.
Generated using Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026 (CC BY 4.0).
Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains.
Location
The museum stands in the north of Munich, at the north-eastern edge of the Olympic Park, six kilometres from Marienplatz and 33 from Munich Airport. The Mittlerer Ring passes just south of it, and the A9 from Nuremberg joins the ring nearby; the BMW Welt car park lies a few metres along Lerchenauer Straße, and the U3 stops at Olympiazentrum, about 500 metres away. The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart is 216 kilometres away along the A8, the Porsche Museum 237.
Around it lies the Olympic Park of 1972, its stadium roofed by the tensile canopies of Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto, and the Olympic Tower, whose platform at 190 metres looks down on the bowl. Messe München is 15 kilometres to the east. To the north, 80 kilometres along the A9, Audi’s museum mobile in Ingolstadt makes a second marque museum of the day. To the south the roads climb towards the Alps: 30 kilometres to Lake Starnberg, 75 to Kochel am See and the Kesselberg, where Hans Stuck won the hill climb in 1934 and 1935, 92 to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and 161 to the Salzburgring across the Austrian border.
Address
2 Am Olympiapark
80809 München
Oberbayern, Bayern
Germany
Website