REFINED COIL

BIG’s watch museum for Audemars Piguet in Switzerland is a poetic glass swirl

- CARAGH MCKAY

Designing a museum in the sublime form of a shimmering peel of glass unfurling from a mountain in a tiny Swiss village is one thing. But, as architect Bjarke Ingels now knows, actually building it in the remote Jura Mountains is most definitely another.

Yet six years after his practice BIG won the competition to design the Audemars Piguet Founder’s House Museum in the Swiss village of Le Brassus, the doors are finally open. Created in association with museum experts HG Merz, engineers Lüchinger+ Meyer, and landscape specialists Muller Illien, BIG’s poetic glass swirl exists despite the fact that construction was predestined to be difficult: whipped by mean north-east winds, temperatures in the Vallée de Joux can fall severely in the long winter months. The glass used in the project was designed to withstand extreme temperature fluctuations, but also proved so tough that it is load-bearing enough to negate the need for other walls.

‘It’s a complicated building. At first, we thought it was crazy, then we just thought, let’s do it,’ says a smiling Jasmine Audemars, chairwoman of the board of directors at Audemars Piguet. ‘We make complicated watch designs and we like to complicate our lives.’ Now in her seventies, the greatgranddaughter of founder Jules Audemars has inherited the family knack for taking the long view and doing the wrong thing brilliantly.