Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet

Environment Design

21 Jan

The shape completely supported by the curved glass wall imitates the spring in the timepiece movement, which combines the core tradition of Audemars Piguet and the spirit of forward-thinking.

BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) designed a contemporary spiral-shaped glass pavilion to complement the Audemars Piguet’s oldest building, where Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet set their workshop, technically a start-up of the old times, in 1875.

In order to explain the soul of the brand, BIG expanded Audemars Piguet's original workshop with a spiral pavilion. The shape completely supported by the curved glass wall imitates the spring in the timepiece movement, which contains profound meaning. According to an in-depth study of the archives, the vernacular architecture of the historic building has been completely restored. Therefore, the concept of Musée Atelier combines the core tradition of Audemars Piguet and the spirit of forward-thinking.

The spiral has been designed to perfectly integrate the surrounding landscape. The floors follow different slants to adapt to the natural gradient of the land and provide the basis of the museum’s inner layout stretched into a linear continuous spatial experience. Inside, the curved glass walls converge clockwise towards the spiral’s centre, before moving in the opposite direction: visitors travel through the building as they would through the spring of a timepiece.

The Musée Atelier’s spiral-shaped pavilion, designed by BIG and realised by the Swiss architecture office CCHE, seamlessly rises on walls of structural curved glass. In the light-filled new building, ATELIER BRÜCKNER has incorporated a rhythmically flowing route through the exhibition. This spiral pavilion also interprets the joint participation of BIG, CCHE, and Audemars Piguet in environmental sustainability.

Bjarke Ingels Group

BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) is a Copenhagen, New York, London, and Barcelona-based group of architects, designers, urbanists, landscape professionals, interior and product designers, researchers, and inventors. The office is currently involved in a large number of projects throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. Not least due to the influence from multicultural exchange, global economical flows, and communication technologies, that all together require new ways of architectural and urban organization.