The Audemars Piguet museum-workshop unveils its heritage collection in a new avant-garde building, boasting an image halfway between tradition and innovation, and a certain boldness.
In the Vallée de Joux, the home of cutting-edge watchmaking for 250 years in the heart of the Swiss Jura mountains with their lakes, pastures, rocks and forests, a strange building reminiscent of a snail shell and a watch spring has risen up. After six years' work overseen by Danish architects Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Audemars Piguet's new museum-workshop has opened in Le Brassus. On site, the founders' house, built in 1868, has housed the workshop of Jules Louis Audemars (1851-1918) and Edward Auguste Piguet (1853-1919) since 1875, as well as its archives, heritage department, restoration workshop and foundation. "Over the years, the world's oldest refined watchmaking factory, still run today by the founders' families, has been steadily creating the superb watchmaking 'complications' for which it is famous," says Sébastian Vivas, director of the museum and heritage department. "But after the quartz crisis of 1992, many Swiss cities decided to highlight the beauty and history of their watchmaking heritage by opening private museums. So our own, housed in the original building remodeled in 2004, presented our collection to our customers in its historical context."
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