Time signature: Audemars Piguet museum

Audemars Piguet is building a museum, but the swiss watchmaker is looking forwards as well as back.

Audemars Piguet’s Maison des Fondateurs at Le Brassus in Switzerland, designed by architect Bjarke Ingels.

To get a glimpse into the future sometimes you need to look at the past. Audemars Piguet isn’t the first watchmaker to build a museum to showcase its horological expertise – such institutions are scattered all over Switzerland – but it will soon be the proud owner of the most architecturally spectacular one. Audemars Piguet has commissioned the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, founder of BIG and one of the world’s most in-demand architects, to design a new museum to house its historical collection of more than 1300 timepieces on the site of a former carpark adjacent to the company’s original workshop building in Le Brassus in Switzerland.

The building, the design of which was chosen from a field of five leading architectural firms in an international competition, will be known as the Maison des Fondateurs (the home of the founders), and will resemble two overlapping spirals partially sunken into the ground. As its upper sections emerge from the ground, the structure will reveal a series of glazed galleries and event spaces. The building, which blends with the landscape, is a radically contemporary structure designed to welcome customers, retailers and staff as well as anyone interested in the history of the brand founded on this site. It’s part of a strategy to make the centuries-old craft of watchmaking as appealing to the millennial generation as the latest smartwatch.

Original Audemars family home.

Founded in 1875 in Le Brassus in the watchmaking heartland of the Vallée de Joux in Switzerland (50km north of Geneva), Audemars Piguet is one of the few Swiss watchmakers still owned and run by the original family. Today the company is helmed by Jasmine Audemars, the great-granddaughter of Jules Louis Audemars, the company’s co-founder with Edward-Auguste Piguet, who is keenly aware of the disruption facing the watch industry today with the growing interest in smart watches, even if their price point is considerably lower than that of an entry-level Audemars Piguet.

1988 minute repeater pocketwatch with split-second chronograph.

“We are in a very challenging world for lots of reasons,” Audemars told WISH at Art Basel earlier this year, where the watch brand presented a new series of photographic works it had commissioned by the British artist Dan Holdsworth. “There are new players in watches such as Apple and it’s quite difficult to see what will happen to the industry. I think perhaps the companies that will suffer are the ones with cheaper prices – say 500 to 1000 Swiss francs ($650-$1300) – but it’s hard to see that it won’t affect us in some way. Audemars Piguet is in another world with mechanical and complicated watches, but it is an issue that all watchmakers are thinking about.

Elliptical women’s pocketwatch, 1971.

In the 1970s the arrival of quartz, or battery-powered, watches completely changed the Swiss watchmaking industry. But while in Switzerland quartz was referred to as a crisis, elsewhere, such as in Japan and the US, the biggest manufacturers of the new watch movements, it was hailed as a revolution. At the time of the introduction of quartz movements Swiss-made mechanical watches dominated the global industry. By 1978 sales of quartz watches overtook mechanical watches, sending the Swiss industry into a tailspin. Eventually the mechanical makers recovered with a focus on the top end of the market, and brands such as Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin and Patek Philippe redoubled their efforts to produce more complicated timepieces to emphasise their expertise and craftsmanship.

Grande Complication minute repeater with perpetual calendar and moon phase.

The arrival of smart watches, according to Audemars, is not so much a fullblown crisis for the industry as it is a period of uncertainty about exactly what impact they will have, she says. “Having said that, it is important that we have a strong industry in Switzerland because a lot of suppliers rely on a strong watch industry and we don’t want this network weakened. If suddenly it seems that classical watchmaking is an old industry then it’s not going to attract young talents and we need a lot of young talents. Today all the watchmaking schools in Switzerland are full, but if the younger generation starts to think of our industry as one that is becoming obsolete then we won’t have people wanting to become watchmakers. So smart watches are going to evolve, that is for sure, and we don’t know where they will go, so it’s kind of a question mark. Maybe we can live together? What we need is a crystal ball.”

Audemars Piguet, whose core business is high-end, hand-made watches with a lot of complications, is in a rarefied realm within the Swiss watchmaking industry. It produces about 38,000 watches per year; Rolex, by comparison, produces closer to a million. “We don’t want to increase the amount of watches we produce,” says Audemars. “I’m sure the market would be happy if we did but we don’t want to because our first priority is quality and then innovation, and innovation takes time. We really want to be quiet and we always prefer to have a steady development rather than surf the waves and then you fall. We prefer to have an excess of demand.

Jasmine Audemars says the company is able to stay focused on quality and innovation in part because it is a family-owned and operated business – and the family intends to keep it that way. They don’t have the same pressures of growing sales targets like some watch brands that belong to publicly listed conglomerates. “In the past, a long time ago, some of the big groups asked if we would consider selling but I think they have understood now that we intend to stay independent,” she says. “We are in a region where watchmaking is important and we have a big responsibility towards the region.

Openworked jewellery wristwatch from 1988.

The Vallée de Joux lies in the Jura mountains, a rugged borderland of dense forests between France and Lake Geneva. It is about 1000m above sea level, 25km end-to-end, and covered in snow throughout the winter. Yet it is considered the cradle of the Swiss watchmaking industry and, as well as Audemars Piguet, it is home to illustrious watch brands such as Breguet, Patek Philippe, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Blancpain, Vacheron Constantin, companies that produce some of the most complicated and valuable watches in the world. This watch industry creates more jobs in this small area of Switzerland than the number of local residents – its proximity to France means that many workers drive over the border each day into Switzerland to work.

The reason the area became so well known for fine watchmaking is actually a result of its geography and isolation. The fertile ground rich in iron oxide made it perfect for farming, but in the long winters farmers had little to do and needed to find alternative sources of income. So the farmers started to make watch parts that they sold to watch firms in Switzerland and abroad; and as the parts were small they were easy to transport which meant the inaccessibility of the area wasn’t a problem.

Gold braided watch from 1970.

French Huguenots settled in the area in the 16th century fleeing persecution in France, and it is often claimed that the strong Protestant faith and work ethic gave the local residents a taste for invention, which meant the watch producers here eventually started to experiment with extremely complicated movements. While firms like Audemars Piguet and Jaeger-LeCoultre actually began in the area, others such as Patek Philippe, Breguet and Vacheron Constantin moved there much later for the expertise that was concentrated in the valley. After the quartz crisis the region actually went through a boom as watch brands came in search of the talents of the local watchmakers. There was a feeling among some brands that to survive in business in an era when quartz-powered watches were cheaper and easier to produce, they needed a clear point of difference. The goal for many brands was to emphasise prowess in producing highly complicated watch movements. Anyone could make a watch that told the time, but few could make timepieces that were also works of art.

“We’ve always tried to build on what we have learned from our forefathers, to accumulate our knowledge and with this to become even better at what we do,” says Audemars. And innovation, she says, isn’t just about the newest technology; it can be about preserving old technologies and trades.

1971 elliptical watch in tiger’s eye.

Not far from where the BIG-designed Audemars Piguet museum will eventually rise is the original Audemars family home, which houses a small museum as well as the restoration workshop. Just two watchmakers work here restoring timepieces that have belonged to customers for years and have found their way back here in need of repair. Very little in the way of modern technology exists in this small room – the tools and production methods used mirror those of 100 years ago and in some cases the watchmakers actually need to build the appropriate tool before they can start work on a restoration. There are carefully catalogued boxes of old watch pieces for specific movements that are used as references in restoration work; these are so precious to the company they are stored in a huge safe. “About the only thing that is modern here is the airconditioning,” says one of the watchmakers. It’s a place where the past and the present perfectly merge in one harmonious little workshop.

Minute repeater with chiming mechanism.