Jewelry in motion: the return of mechanical automata

To get to François Junod's workshop you have to climb to the highest part of Sainte-Croix, a town of 5,000 inhabitants perched in the Jura valley, in Switzerland.

The most famous automaton builder in the world was born here in 1969 and has been in this building for 25 years, which has been expanding with annexes, extensions and employees.

One of the rooms looks like a toymaker's workshop: there are anthropomorphic heads, pencils, papers, wood shavings and brass gears scattered across the tables.

In another room, mechanical work takes place between 3D printing machines and watchmaker's tools.

The founder's personal study, a loft overlooking the Alps, houses prodigious objects that he agrees to show us.

Enameling process of the Heures Florales watch, one of the firm's Poetic Complications.Johann Sauty

In its most essential version, its genius fits in the palm of a hand.

They are winding mechanisms with brass discs, wires and pieces of wood or cardboard that, when the key is turned, evoke an apparently simple movement: the flapping of wings, eyes that open and close, a mouth that seems to speak.

In its most sophisticated version, Junod's creations are so extraordinary that it is almost impossible to see them live.

Starting in 2022, the jewelry and watchmaking house Van Cleef & Arpels will install some of the watches it develops with it at the annual Watches and Wonders show in Geneva.

There the public can contemplate these objects that a manager activates every 15 minutes.

For example, a fountain with water lilies where two birds in love meet, a cyclamen from which a hummingbird or a butterfly emerges.

Everything moves, from the surface of the water to the eyes of the animals.

A wooden model in Junod.Johann Sauty's workshop

The automata Junod creates for Van Cleef & Arpels take the house's prohibitive jewelry and enamelling techniques to a large scale.

In fact, these pieces are the only ones in the entire fair whose price is not made public.

They are collector's items of which only a couple of models are produced a year.

The firm confirms that several of them have been sold, but do not give more details.

In his workshop, in front of a cardboard model of the cyclamen presented in 2023, the artisan says that the starting point is always the outside: the design of the final piece and the story it tells.

“Proportions are important.

If there is a bird, it must be of the appropriate size and weight.

We do a lot of testing and prototyping.

Then we create the final models and, finally, the mechanism that goes inside, and adapts to the aesthetics, never the other way around.”

A detail of the large Planétarium (2022) belonging to the collection of Extraordinary Objects by Van Cleef & Arpels.Van Cleef & Arpels

Junod is not only a master of complexity.

He also has a sense of humor and a fine surrealist sensibility.

When he started, in the eighties, most automaton builders were limited to replicating concepts from the French 19th century: harlequins, clerks, musicians.

The Swiss took the job to another level.

One of his masterpieces is a tribute to Alexander Pushkin, 80 centimeters high.

He recalls the most famous automata in the world, created by Jaquet Droz at the end of the 18th century and which are today preserved – a harpsichordist, a writer and a draftsman, still in operation – in the Neuchâtel Museum.

Junod's Pushkin, presented in 2010 and acquired by a mysterious collector, is a writer capable of handwriting Dadaist poems with ink and paper thanks to a system of hundreds of disks that are randomly combined to generate almost 1,500 different combinations.

It is a feat made with humble materials, such as wood, cardboard, fabric, wire and brass.

Rainer Bernard, director of watch research and development of the house.Johann Sauty

But his creations for Van Cleef & Arpels, with whom he began collaborating 15 years ago, are a different matter.

It is not the same to move a paper bird as one made of jewels.

“Gold weighs a lot,” Junod confesses.

“That's why we try to make birds' feathers very light and thin.”

This is where the jewelry and ornamentation workshops of Van Cleef & Arpels come into play, experts in very delicate operations with precious materials.

There is no room for improvisation in them.

You can't even resort to the handy flaps to hide the mechanisms.

“These objects are somewhere between fine watchmaking and fine jewelry, so the house's gemologists choose rare ornamental stones for the base,” explains Nicolas Bos, president and CEO of the house.

“François Junod's experience in mechanical movements is combined with the work of lapidaries, engravers, jewelers, stone carvers, enamelers, lacquerers, watchmakers and cabinetmakers,” he lists.

Automata Éveil du Cyclamen (2022), by Van Cleef & Arpels.Van Cleef & Arpels

All these trades are concentrated in the watchmaking workshops in Meyrin, next to Geneva.

A legion of artisans work there.

The house's specialty is the so-called Poetic Complications, clocks with intricately decorated dials in which the time is indicated through small mechanical animations: lovers meeting with a kiss on a bridge, a dancer performing a dance step , flowers that open and close or a tiny butterfly that flaps its wings randomly, as if it were alive.

They are miniature theaters.

“Our objects always contain a story,” says Rainer Bernard, director of watchmaking research and development at the house, who has invited El País Semanal to learn about his artisan work.

The automaton Rêveries de Berylline (2023), created together with François Junod.Van Cleef & Arpels

One of his most ambitious projects is a planetarium that is inspired by the astronomical tables of the 18th century.

Its mechanical heart animates the orbits of the planets around the sun, which follow the same evolution in real time of the stars they represent, and which are in themselves precious jewelry objects.

If the user wants to know the time, he must activate a mechanism and a shooting star stops at the exact point on the dial corresponding to the time.

“They are a perfect way to create stories with the technologies we love, all the craftsmanship associated with watchmaking and jewelry, enamelling and the creation of automata,” explains Bernard.

It does not seem a coincidence that his return occurs precisely now that artificial intelligence and virtual technologies are supposed to have banished mechanics forever.

His wind-up mechanisms, foreign to electricity, display his own mystique.

“There is something magical about movement,” Junod reflects.

“It is a program, but the public experiences it as a spectacle.

The flower opens, the butterfly comes out, flutters its wings, returns, the flower closes, the chime continues ringing and then it ends.

And people ask to see it again, and again, and again.”

Samples of the different shades of polish.Johann Sauty

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