The Musée International d’Horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds

By Nadja Maillard

In 1974, while the watchmaking world was trying to read its future in a quartz crystal, the city of La Chaux-de-Fonds was unveiling a cite dedicated to watchmaking history: the Musée International d’Horlogerie (MIH). The building, designed by architects Pierre Zoelly and Georges-Jacques Haefeli, was immediately hailed as an event. A superb example of brutalist architecture and almost entirely buried in the ground, the museum is undeniably as discreet as its collections are rich. Its vast range, in terms of chronology and typology, and the care the founders took to make such an incredible heritage available to a wide public, position the institution among the world’s greatest museums dedicated to measuring time. By including a Centre for the restoration of antique watches as well as an academic mission with the Centre d’Études L’Homme et le Temps, the MIH far exceeds its sole purpose as a museum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gesellschaft für Schweizerische Kunstgeschichte
• Release date: Apr 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9783037978887

Book preview

Nadja Maillard

The Musée International d’Horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds

Canton of Neuchâtel

The watchmaking spirit

The site

Tailor-made museum

Industry showcase

The competition

The architects

Pierre Zoelly (1923–2003)

Georges-Jacques Haefeli (1934–2010)

Underneath an English garden

Constructive elements, expression and material

Concrete and stone

The space of a visit

From references to influences

Museography

Abundant press coverage

Betting on the future

Appendix

The watchmaking spirit

Fifty years ago, according to the 18 October 1974 issue of the Neuchâtel- based newspaper L’Impartial, we inaugurated our ‘watchmaking temple’. A sacred crypt, set apart from the rest of the world – to use the etymology of the word templum honouring the beauty of the timepieces and spaces imagined by architects Pierre Zoelly and Georges-Jacques Haefeli. A universe existing outside of time, all the better for highlighting and admiring these precious timekeeping objects.

Nadja Maillard’s account invites us to retrace the story of the architectural achievement that received numerous awards, including the European Museum of the Year. Ours is a museum conscious of the questions of its time, as much concerned with ‘heritage conservation’ as with perpetuating ‘historical awareness’ – an often-heroic task.

Finally, the museum is an ideal example of the connections between the watchmaking industry heads and the cantonal and Swiss authorities. Three months before the first oil crisis, bolstered by a significant patronage, the latter committed themselves with conviction to the construction of a building worthy of the city’s gods.

Let us hope that the path our predecessors forged, in light of the spirit of solidarity, creativity and innovation, will continue for many years to come. In this way, our Musée International d’Horlogerie and our beautiful city will shine as one.

Théo Bregnard,

City Councillor for Culture, La Chaux-de-Fonds

FIG. 1 Julien Calame known as du Torrent (1828-1892), La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1886, seen from the Rue des Crêtets, oil on canvas. To the right, the wooded grounds of the Sandoz house, which became the Musée d’Histoire, clearly demarcated by its boundary walls. Today the Parc des Musées, it remains an important urban landmark.

The site

On 13 April 1830, the State Council approved the Règlement […] pour les rues de la Promenade et du Repos, a city planning document for a project by Henri-Louis Jacot that outlined the creation and allotment of two streets forming a square at the south end of the village. The regulation came with a topographical map drawn up the same year that would serve, on the one hand, to create a Plan géologique de La Chaux-de-Fonds (Geological map of La Chaux-de-Fonds) (1833) and that was, on the other, taken into consideration in the Plan général des alignements du village de La Chaux-de-Fonds (General map of building lines of the village of La Chaux-de-Fonds), an actual template of what would soon be the city’s urban framework. In this way, a single planimetric document ended up placing the temporal scale of the area’s land masses alongside the historical scale of the city and its constructions, thus juxtaposing the long stretch of geological time with the brevity of human time.

The future site of the Musée International d’Horlogerie (MIH) was located on the north-facing slope of the bowl in which the city was built. Prints from the first half of the 19th century show a rural countryside, but its future development was already foreseen in the 1841 General map of building lines, with its four parallel east-west streets. The large adjacent pasture was then called the Pré du Jet-d’Eau. The arrival of the railway in 1857 furthered the city’s expansion and decisively determined its later development. Seen as a symbol of progress, the station represented – as much from both an urbanistic and symbolic perspective – a new gateway to the city, changing its centre of gravity. In the southern districts, land parcels