Situated in this contemporary glass building, the main exhibition presents some 300 timepieces spanning over 200 years of watchmaking history in the Vallée de Joux. Realised by CCHE, the building is entirely supported by 108 unique structural glass panes – 12mm thick combined in seven layers of curved glass – while the 470-ton steel roof that coils into the air is covered in grass that helps regulate temperature while absorbing water.
A design for the new art district was seen not as an entity detached from the city but as a trigger for the redevelopment of an abandoned area by the railway
Te watch museum rises up out of the
pastures, a world away from Switzerland’s worldly cities, and that scornful, incorrect assessment of Swiss creativity summed up in British director Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man: ‘Tey had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Here, just north of Lausanne, and in the city itself, that quip might today be considered a compliment.