Hôtel des Horlogers by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, Le Brassus, Switzerland

BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group has designed a hotel for watch enthusiasts in the canton of Vaud in western Switzerland, adjacent to the museum BIG previously built for watchmaker Audemars Piguet.

In Salvador Dalí’s famous surrealistic paintings, watches are often depicted as soft, hanging over tree branches like wet towels, time dripping from their edges. At the new hotel in Le Brassus, in Vallée de Joux, a valley of the Jura Mountains in western Switzerland known as “Watch Valley,” time is translated by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group into another shape: a constant slope. The zig-zag building suggests that when you are born you have a lot of time, but for the rest of your life you are slowly but surely gliding down the ramp of time.