Iconic Time Production
IWC Manufacturing Center, Schaffhausen
When the company IWC Schaffhausen reached its physical limits, despite numerous extensions to its original premises in the heart of historic Schaffhausen, it decided to build a new facility. As specialists for integrated design and with our uncompromising focus on the core process of our clients, we designed an elegant manufacturing center for the noble craft of watchmaking.
The new facility brings together the manufacture of components, movements, and cases in a single location, significantly improving production processes. Visitors have the opportunity to experience the creation of IWC’s luxury watches at first hand. The building is home to the implementation of optimized production logistics that cover the entire production and assembly process. Thanks to the close cooperation with the client, ATP Zurich was able to meet the high constructional and technical requirements of the manufacturing center and to optimally coordinate its processes in line with the criteria of lean & quality manufacturing. After operating for just six months, the center had already proved itself to be highly efficient. The integrally designed building complex is also highly flexible in order to allow production to be constantly adapted to the needs of the market.
Corporate Design
The IWC Manufacturing Center slips elegantly into the rolling landscape, recalling the pavilion-like buildings of the Modern Movement. It reflects the premium corporate design of the luxury watch brand and, just like IWC itself, combines craft skills and technical innovation. Visitors enter the world of IWC upon arriving in the elegant entrance hall. A broad and imposing concrete stair leads to a space in which an over-dimensional precision timepiece displays the time in the form of a “perpetual calendar.” The colors black and white dominate the interiors, enhanced by light-gray floors, black-finished concrete walls, and subtle timber accents. In line with the client’s wish that no building technology should be visible, the facility has nothing of the air of a normal factory. And this resolute design approach continues within the building in the shape of a uniform flexible solution for all media connections.
The building looks so simple, so filigree and so contemporary like an IWC Portugieser watch.
Jürgen Zipf
Architect, Lead Project Manager in Zurich
Production/Showroom
The client paid huge attention to the sustainable and economic organization of the building. Up to 450 employees are able to work in the manufacturing halls. The selection of a continuous structural grid enables both furniture and machinery to be positioned flexibly within the production areas. All the spaces are also designed for the integration and replacement of large items of building plant so that machinery can be later added or upgraded without extra complications. The complex that was designed in the form of a digital twin in the studios of ATP Zurich with the help of Building Information Modeling (BIM) can now be experienced at first hand by visitors to the manufacturing center.
