Temples of vroom

In a town where the car is God, there's a new cathedral. Silvery and enigmatic, the Mercedes-Benz museum sits just off the B14 highway as it dips into a gentle fold of the Neckar Valley. Designed by Dutch architects Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, the 15-story building looks like a loosely interleaved stack of postmodern pancakes, its bands of aluminum and glass rising in an undisciplined kinetic wobble above a granite pavilion. Mercedes-Benz has long had its stamp on Stuttgart's sky — a three-pointed star rotates above the Hauptbahnhof, or train station — but now, with the $50-million edifice planted on the outskirts of the city as a kind of ceremonial gateway, the company's dominion seems more ecclesiastical than corporate.

And why not? Germany's automakers are locked in a fierce competition — reminiscent of medieval city-states' cathedral wars — to see which can build the grandest temple. For travelers tired of schlepping from one Our Lady of Whatever to another, the German automakers' building spree offers a rich new itinerary — showrooms, museums and tours — that traces the technological triumphs of the Automotive Age, the passion for motor sports, the renaissance of postwar Germany and the cost-is-no-object ambitions of brand-name architects.

Of course, automakers routinely commission futuristic buildings from rock-star architects to serve as metaphoric extensions of the brand. General Motors' Technical Center in Warren, Mich., was designed by Eero Saarinen; Ferrari's wind-tunnel facility in Maranello, Italy, is the work of Pritzker Prize winner Renzo Piano.

But never has the competition been so close or so intramural. While the first season of tourists is trooping through the Mercedes-Benz museum — the building opened in May — BMW is rushing to complete its own major expansion of its group headquarters in Munich. BMW's distinctive teacup-shaped museum is being renovated as part of a sprawling and astonishingly avant-garde project scheduled to open in summer 2007.

And so, a car-buff's dream.

Mercedes-Benz: Historic site

THE place to start is the Mercedes-Benz museum, built on hallowed ground. Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach — founders of the Daimler company and fairly called the inventors of the automobile — sorted out their first chuffing engines only yards from here in the early 1880s; nearby is Mercedes-Benz' heroic-scaled Unterturkheim assembly plants and the Gottlieb Daimler Stadium.

It's here that Mercedes-Benz has chosen to house its 120 years of history — the trembling, motorized surreys of the early days, the grosser sedans of the Nazis' Third Reich, and the Silver Arrows, the company's indomitable competition cars from middle 20th century.

"As a museum structure, it's fascinating," says Dennis Adler, an automotive historian and author of four books about Mercedes-Benz.

"It's beautifully built, imposing from the outside and impressive from the inside. As a statement of technology, it reminds me of the SLR McLaren" — Mercedes 200-mph, $450,000 super sports car, Adler says. "They're both 21st century Mercedes."

In my capacity as The Times' automotive critic, I've been to Stuttgart many times (Porsche is also headquartered here), but I've never shaken the sense of seismic consequence, the awareness of the repercussions, good and bad, that emanate from this place. The automobile changed the world, and that change started here.

Cynics might dismiss Mercedes' museum as just another temple of corporate self-love, but some part of it — perhaps its thick, over-engineered sturdiness — seems intended as a signpost to history.

Inside, there are nine levels warped dramatically around a towering open atrium, providing space to display 160 cars and other vehicles. In this building that knows no right angles, the word "level" is merely a convenient misnomer.

Designed as a double helix, the interior curves and loops and pours through open spaces in a way that defies quaint architectural distinctions such as floors. Visitors take a futuristic elevator-capsule to the top and descend on parquet ramps, à la the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

I'll leave it to specialists to debate whether the building is particularly effective — it seems to require two trips to the top to see it all, and the floorplan does supply moments of "Where are-the-stairs?" bafflement — but it sure is an architectural spectacle, a statement of corporate mastery and modernity that tries very hard to be overwhelming. It succeeds.

"I don't know if it's good for architecture," says Paul Tesar, professor of architecture at North Carolina State University and a onetime Stuttgart resident. "But it seems to be good for business."

VW: A drive to 'Car City'

OTHER carmakers have their showplace factories and museums. Volkswagen has its own city. Roughly two hours west of Berlin on the A2, in Wolfsburg, the Autostadt (literally, Car City) is a sprawling automotive theme park.

Built in the style of an off-world colony, the complex is a mad cavort of futuristic buildings, some with roofs strung from canted pylons, some with exterior walls undulating like sea snakes and all of it jigsaw-fitted into a park landscape with a large connecting lake. Designed by Gunter Henn, the Autostadt offers visitors — the lucky ones stay at the Ritz-Carlton on campus — a full day of auto-centric adventure.

For kids, there's the LernPark, a low-speed course where they can practice the fundamentals of driving in electric cars (Germans take driving skills very seriously).