Kieran Long Zaha Hadid’s new BMW factory in Leipzig is the latest strike in the war of architectural one-upmanship that has broken out amongst German car manufacturers. In the blue corner is Mercedes, with a new museum by Dutch radicals UN Studio. In the red is BMW with its soon to be built BMW World visitor centre by Austrian deconstructivists Coop Himmelblau, and now a new factory building in Leipzig by Zaha Hadid. The architecture that BMW and Mercedes have chosen is the formally hyperactive shape-making most obvious in the work of Hadid, brought in to give a certain intellectual and aesthetic sheen to the business of selling luxury cars.