AION in Lucerne

Lucerne has another world-class attraction. Bucherer presents the world’s largest indoor rolling ball clock. Customers and visitors can view the unique kinetic sculpture at the newly renovated store on Schwanenplatz. The clock towers up a full four stories and each floor provides an unusual new insight into a fascinating world of precision, movement and energy.

At the heart of the structure is a large clock, which is based and operates on kinetic principles and contains a collection of highly complex mechanisms. At the watch's periphery, rolling glass spheres – which are continuously in motion – indicate the seconds, minutes, quarters and hours in an impressive spectacle depicting time.

The installation springs to life at one-second intervals. Spheres roll continuously through a plane consisting of spirals as far as the big clock. Thanks to kinetic energy, the spheres find their way through the channels at high speed until they reach the enormous chapter ring. One sphere is captured by the ring each minute until, finally, 60 spheres add up an hour. The equilibrium between the racing glass spheres is provided by a gigantic illuminated crystal ball, which oscillates on two glittering channels at quarter-hourly intervals.

The mechanical components are precision aligned to each other and combine to create a fascinating time-keeping system: it is precise, self-contained, and infinite. In a very real sense, then, the sculpture reflects the qualities that set Bucherer apart: reliability, uniqueness, value, precision and quality.

The astonishing installation extends upwards to take in all four floors of the store and is 11.6 meters in height and 6 meters wide. Inside the entire system there are 150 crystal spheres of 30, 40 and 150 millimeters in diameter moving through 297.8 meters of track. The sheer dimension of the project prompted the artists behind it to apply for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records.

The idea of installing an exclusive clock sculpture in the renovated Bucherer store was born in the company’s own workshops and, through a process of liaison with Creative Circle GmbH in Bern, resulted in the commissioning of the rolling ball clock. The worldwide interest from artists working with kinetic forces to design a ball track on this scale was enormous. In the end, the job of conceiving and producing the world’s largest rolling ball clock was entrusted to Swiss-born Hanns-Martin Wagner and a German, Mark Bischof.

Dyed-in-the-wool aesthetes that they are, the two of them enthusiastically set to work with the ambitious goal of uniting elegance, perfection and attention to detail in a work of art. The feasibility studies for the project started in spring 2006. After this intensive planning phase, the two artists looked into the viability of making a ball track on his scale and of this precision. In the end, after a construction and installation phase lasting about a year – all the parts and components are unique and have to be precision-made by hand – the sculpture went into operation to mark the opening of Bucherer’s new sales outlet.

Kinetic art is a form of artistic expression in which the motion of a mechanism is an integral aesthetic component of the work of art in question. A transparent design that allows viewers to observe the mechanism at work is a central aspect of kinetic sculptures, which were particularly popular in the 1960s.

The pre-modernist origins of kinetic art go back all the way to the artistically crafted mechanical apparatus and aesthetic water features of the Baroque period. Its best-known protagonists in the modern age are Alexander Calder (1898-1976), with his stables and mobiles, and Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), who created whimsical working machines from scrap metal. In rolling ball sculptures the effect of gravity on spheres is used to demonstrate motion. The simplest of all ball tracks is the path described by a free-falling sphere.

Creative Circle GmbH

Creative Circle GmbH is a leading communications agency from Bern with enormous expertise in the watch and jewelry sector. The agency dreams up, develops and realizes two- and three-dimensional communication ideas. It was a brainstorming session that produced the idea and the concept for the world’s biggest rolling ball clock.

Hanns-Martin Wagner

Hanns-Martin Wagner specializes in rolling ball systems and mechanisms. In 2006, he created an interactive rolling ball sculpture standing seven meters high for the Children’s Museum in Amman, Jordan. As the founder of Sinneswerkstatt GmbH he now has a network of artists and specialists that enables him to satisfy a wide range of customer needs.

He builds, sells and rents out exhibits for museums, corporations, institutions, advertising and events. The company specializes in rolling ball systems of all sizes, kinetic objects and automata.

Mark Bischof (1958, Duisburg)

Following a career in music that taught him the importance of disciple and imagination, Mark Bischof discovered his passion for working with wood and mechanical objects in 1989. He embarked upon years of woodworking experimentation and created a string of artistic objects before finally discovering his vocation in the creation of moving ball systems and sculptures powered by gravity.

The rolling ball clock is his second project with Hanns-Martin Wagner. His work has even made it as far as Hollywood: replicas of his sculptures feature in Fracture (2007), a movie starring Anthony Hopkins.