This piece is about the creative career of one of the AHCI's co-founders.
The Swiss-based watchmaker of Danish origin by the name of Svend Andersen is now mainly known as one of the co-founders of the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendant (AHCI), although he was already known for something else before that. Andersen graduated from the Danish School of Watchmaking, which belonged to the Royal Institute of Technology in Copenhagen.
Then in 1963, he decided to move to the luxury watch industry's global hub in Switzerland. His first job was at the after-sales service center of the Swiss retail chain Gübelin in Lucerne, then he transferred to Gübelin Geneva in 1965. It's not uncommon for talented and diligent watchmakers with big imaginations and a strong work ethic to feel held back at work. Andersen couldn't be limited to just doing his job at the service center; he wanted to bring his own timepieces to life.
An idea came to him from the exotic model ships assembled inside bottles known as "impossible bottles". Andersen wanted to do something similar with mechanical clocks, which it seems no one had ever tried before him. What would make these clocks all the more curious is that they'd also resemble the sand timers known as hourglasses.
His first Bottle Clock was unveiled at the Montres et Bijoux show, where the mysterious exhibit along with its inventor were discovered by someone from the Patek Philippe manufacture. As a result, Svend Andersen was invited to join the famous “Atelier des Grandes Complications” at Patek Philippe in Geneva.
He accepted the offer and began assembling complicated movements there in 1969, where he’d continue to work for the next nine years. Among other things, he was given the chance to work on Patek Philippe's World Time models, a complicated display invented by the Genevan watchmaker Louis Cottier in the 1930s.
The watch Cottier developed displayed the local time with central hour and minute hands, and displayed World Time by a rotating ring with a 24-hour scale against another fixed ring scale with the names of 24 reference cities (they could also be inscribed around the outer bezel), one for each of the world's 24 time zones. Andersen would later return to worldtimers as an independent watchmaker in 1989, which became a signature line of sorts in his own collection.
Svend Andersen went it alone in 1978. In the early days, his main clients keeping him afloat were Italian collectors who ordered his watch cases. Clients gradually become more interested in his fully manufactured watches, primarily the complicated variety. But business was tough in the beginning.
On the one hand, times were tough for everyone in the Swiss watch industry, mainly due to the latest craze for quartz watches. On the other hand, Svend Andersen had to deal with a mixed reception from the public.
The idea worked, and the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendant attracted more and more attention for independent watchmakers
He wasn't born in Switzerland, and back then the words "good watchmaker" were synonymous with "Swiss watchmaker" in people's minds. Fellow watchmaker Vincent Calabrese was another outsider from Italy who came up with an idea of how overcome this barrier.
He suggested setting up a guild of kinds for independent watchmakers, which would promote the values of traditional watchmaking and help independent watchmakers organize as a collective to participate in exhibitions, sharing the burden of costs they inevitably entail.
The idea worked, and the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendant attracted more and more attention for independent watchmakers. Aficionados and collectors were no longer their only patrons — independent watchmakers also began securing contracts with major watch brands.
Similarly to how Patek Philippe forges new personnel like a blacksmith, it should be noted that Svend Andersen helped many budding watchmakers find their feet. One of the people who worked for him was Franck Muller (from 1984 to 1991), who later went on to establish his own brand, as well as Urwerk co-founder Felix Baumgartner.
Svend Andersen never set out to create his watches from start to finish all by himself. He was happy to invite other specialists to take part in projects when help was needed, and even enlisted watchmakers who are no longer with us today so to speak, as Andersen preferred and still prefers to use ready-made movements in his collection, primarily vintage ones.
For example, some of the movements housed in his watches include the "Wehrmachtswerk" Caliber AS 1130 from the Swiss A. Schild ébauche and watch movement factory (produced in the 1950s and 1960s), the ultra-thin Frédéric Piguet Caliber 15 for pocket watches, as well as the ultra-thin and compact hand-winding Caliber 21 and the ultra-thin automatic Caliber 9.51 from the same factory.
Needless to say, all of these movements received a sophisticated final finishing, and have complications designed by Svend Andersen added onto them. The base movement itself also often modified. Andersen only ever had one complicated mechanism made for his watches: the indicators used in the Automaton Joker watch released in a rare collaboration with the Russian watchmaker Konstantin Chaykin.
In 1989, Andersen developed the smallest calendar watch ever produced. Its movement based on the LeCoultre 104 movement equipped with a miniature hands to display the date and weekday was 6.5 mm × 17.4 mm in size, which earned the watchmaker who created it a place in the Guinness Book of Records.
The Mundus was another record-breaking watch made by Andersen in 1993. Based on the Frédéric Piguet Caliber 21, it became the world’s thinnest worldtimer with a 4.2 mm thick watch case. Worldtime is a classic theme in Svend Andersen's work. It all began with the automatic Communication watch back in 1989, which was made based on the Frédéric Piguet Caliber 9.51. The Christopher Columbus model was introduced in 1992 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ journey to the "New World".
The Mundus watch that has already been mentioned was launched in 1993. Then in 2004, Svend Andersen made the 1884 series to celebrate the 120th anniversary since the worldwide standard time zones were adopted, and also in honor of their proponent Sandford Fleming. The 1884 is a rare example of a watch Andersen has created his own movement for.
A decade later in 2014, 25 years since Andersen Genève’s first Worldtime watch made 25 years prior, the latest — the Tempus Terrae — was finally unveiled. Many other examples made for private orders could be included here, but it's almost impossible to hunt down comprehensive information about them. A new theme appeared in the Andersen Genève collection in 1996 — the perpetual calendar.
This function is considered a classic, yet Andersen managed to put his own spin on it. He created a perpetual secular calendar which counts the leap years cycle according to the Gregorian calendar, i.e. 29 days in February 2000 and 2400, and 28 days in February 2100, 2200 and 2300, etc.
The model named the Andersen Genève Perpetual Secular Calendar was the world's first wristwatch to offer this function. In 2016, Perpetual Secular Calender 20th Anniversary with Days Indication was released to mark the 20th anniversary since the first Perpetual Secular Calender was launched.
This function is considered a classic, yet Andersen managed to put his own spin on it
A weekday indicator with markings in the form of the seven celestial bodies traditionally used to represent each day of the week was added to the dial. The 1996 model didn't have any display of this sort. Svend Andersen has his own take on classic watchmaking designs. One of the many times he proved this was when he presented the Montre à Tact wristwatch in 1999.
This design now considered a classic was invented by Abraham-Louis Breguet in 1799. The time was read on these timepieces by turning a special hand or arrow clockwise on the outside of the case until it was felt to stop (at the time, it was considered unseemly to take out a pocket watch to read the time in someone's company).
Svend Andersen proposed another solution based on the design of one of Breguet's "tactile" timepieces, one which hardly ever comes to the attention of the public. The watch dating back to around 1800 is housed in the National Museum in Stockholm. There's an hour marking on the side of the case, so the time doesn't necessarily have to be read by touch, you can look at the watch from the side.
Svend Andersen incorporated a lateral time display into the case band for his Montre à Tact watch, with an aperture between the lugs where the strap is attached. Time is displayed in the form of a rotating cylinder with hour markers. The watchmaker has made numerous variations of the Montre à Tact since 1996, including a watch for her with a domed case completely covered with diamonds.
Many of Svend Andersen's watches share one rare feature — the rich blue shade of their guilloché dials. This shade of blue isn't achieved by applying layers of paint, applying a coating, or by conventional steel bluing. What makes it unusual is the material used in the dial — 21-karat gold. The recipe for the blue gold alloy contains nickel and iron, which oxidizes when heated to produce the blue hue.
It was patented in 1988 by the Genevan jeweler Ludwig Muller who sold Andersen the right to use the alloy. Andersen still entrusts the task of turning components blue to Muller's son Martin so that everything turns out just right. Andersen Genève was acquired by Pierre-Alexandre Aeschlimann in 2015, but Svend Andersen is still involved in the company.