A guard lifts a barrier, allowing us to drive in. Porsches are everywhere. You've never seen so many. Front-engined Porsches, rear-engined Porsches, red ones, white ones, maroon ones, even one with no paint at all, left bare as a test of the galvanized-steel body (it looks awful, but not rusty). There are rows of parked Porsches and more idling around looking for a place to park. Sixteen hundred employees pour into this place every day, and after a while, you begin to realize these jellybean-colored sports cars, so highly prized else-where, are transportation here. The staffers would take a 930 off for hamburgers if the company canteen weren't the best dining room around.
Architecturally, the theme of Weissach seems to be expedience. When the place was still in the planning stages, the employees were given the choice of which they wanted first: permanent offices, or tracks and experimental shops. It was no contest. So the desk work was done in wood-framed barracks while the engineering facilities were put into place. Leaving the main office building for last also left time for it to be scienced to the rafters. It's a modular sort of thing, a series of glass-sided hexagons standing one against another-if more space is needed, throw up another hexagon (they were, in fact, adding one during our visit). These aren't ordinary glass-sided hexagons, however. They have bright-orange Venetian blinds hanging on the outside. And the blinds are wired to an electronic brain somewhere that raises, lowers, and tilts them according to its own view of what's right for the inmates. You can imagine what sports-car engineers witha strong preference for manual steering and U-shift-it transmissions think about such automation. Even visitors can hear the murmuring.