Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, Architect: BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group. Architect of Record: CCHE. Landscape Architect: Muller Illien Landschaftsarchitekten. Location: Le Brassus, Switzerland. Photo: Iwan Baan.
Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, Architect: BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group. Architect of Record: CCHE. Landscape Architect: Muller Illien Landschaftsarchitekten. Location: Le Brassus, Switzerland. Photo: Iwan Baan.
Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, Architect: BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group. Architect of Record: CCHE. Landscape Architect: Muller Illien Landschaftsarchitekten. Location: Le Brassus, Switzerland. Photo: Iwan Baan.
Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, Architect: BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group. Architect of Record: CCHE. Landscape Architect: Muller Illien Landschaftsarchitekten. Location: Le Brassus, Switzerland. Photo: Iwan Baan.
Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, Architect: BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group. Architect of Record: CCHE. Landscape Architect: Muller Illien Landschaftsarchitekten. Location: Le Brassus, Switzerland. Photo: Iwan Baan.
Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, Architect: BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group. Architect of Record: CCHE. Landscape Architect: Muller Illien Landschaftsarchitekten. Location: Le Brassus, Switzerland. Photo: Iwan Baan.
Nestled in the heart of La Vallée de Joux, known as the birthplace of Swiss horology, Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet is an extension and new museum that preserves the brand’s rich legacy while celebrating its spirit of innovation. Like architecture, watchmaking is the art and science of giving inanimate matter intelligence and performance. The museum for the watchmaker Audemars Piguet is inspired by the convergence of form and content in clockwork. It's conceived like the coils of a watch, ticking and advancing in perpetuity like the gallery visitors and watchmakers moving cyclically within the structure. Every element is governed by the functional requirements of the exhibition, while appearing as a striking sculpture conceived in a single gesture. The galleries are turned into a chronological journey, creating a double spiral with the largest galleries in the middle that then unwind. We eliminated all of the columns so that the roof is carried by glass, like a spring hovering overhead. The resultant architecture is a land-based Spiral Jetty, a coil of grass on the meadows of the valley. An architecture in which the form is inseparable from its content, exposed like the gears and springs in a skeletonized open work.
