PEOPLE & PROCESS
Traditional Crafts & Makers
Pocket knives, mechanical movements and the regions whose whole urban fabric grew around a craft.
The Alpine region's most famous products are not apps but objects: a folding knife designed in 1897, a mechanical watch movement regulated to fractions of a second, ceramics and cutlery shaped by hand long before anyone spoke of industrial design.
Craft here is not a museum piece. It survives because it kept solving real problems — equipping soldiers, telling time at sea, fitting an entire toolkit into a pocket — and because whole towns reorganised themselves around it. The watchmaking cities of the Swiss Jura were laid out street by street to catch daylight for the workshops inside.
In this topic the Atlas profiles the crafts that became industries and the makers who still practise them, examining what the hands actually do and why the knowledge is hard to automate.
Karl Elsener's cutlery workshop, founded in Ibach in 1884, supplied the Swiss Army its first soldier knife in 1891 and patented the Officer's Knife in 1897 — the origin of the most recognised object Switzerland produces.
In the Jura mountains of the canton of Neuchâtel, two towns were rebuilt street-by-street for the craft of precision: La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2009, home of the Musée International d'Horlogerie and its 10,000-object collection.