Star Wars Watches

P16
Star Wars Watches
A new Swiss firm is designing collectible, futuristic timepie
URWERK, AN UPSTART SWISS WATCHMAKER, COULD NOT BE
found in a booth at the Salon International de la Haute
Horlogerie in January, but instead, true to fonn, it had
staked out an iconoclastic position on the periphery of the
Geneva watch fair. In the presidential suite of the Four
Seasons Hotel des Bergues, a rotating shift of journalists
and collectors came to hear Urwerk's co-founder wax poetic about how the flnn makes only 150 futuristic-looking
watches a year "in the spirit of an art project." Over at
the dining-room table, an earnest engineer demonstrated
the latest ''flyback hand," a mechanism that counts down
minutes before snapping back, on the hour, to its zero position, a gadget in the company's just-released model.
Urwerk, as this scene suggests, is rattling Switzerland's traditional watch industry with its brand of hardedged modernism. It should be on the radar of U.S. collectors. The fIrm was founded in 1997 by a third-generation
Swiss watchmaker, Felix Baumgartner, and a hard-driving
Swiss artist, Martin Frei, who had partly earned his international artist cred while living in Brooklyn, N.Y. (Baumgartner's brother, Thomas, helped found Urwerk but left
the firm.)
As Frei tells it, both he and the Baumgartner brothers
were tired of the tradition-bound watches that the Swiss
watch industry was producing, and they spent a couple of
years discussing how they might create timepieces with a
genuine 21st century aesthetic and technology at their
core. Their fIrst effort, the DR-WI, had no traditional
watch dial but a deceptively simple portal that allowed the
time of day to migrate like a rising and setting sun across
the gold watch face, the correct hour visible on a rotating
disc seen through the portal. The 101 did not sell well. The
watch was inspired by the 17th-century Campanus Night
Clock and looked more retro than futuristic; it was also
hard to read if you wanted to know the exact time.
Urwerk's fortunes changed considerably in 2005, when
Harry Winston had the offbeat partners design the jeweler's innovative Opus V watch, the same year that
Urwerk released its Maxwell Smart-looking UR-103.03.
This fIrmly futuristic watch -with no traditional dial,
hands, or wheels-sported a crystal in
the shape of a horseshoe that revealed
A prototype
~a carousel with rotating discs of numdrawing of the
bers, like satellites.
UR-210 by
~ As the day proceeded, the carousel
co-founder
.,slowly rotated the correct satellite and
Martin Frei
o hour digit to the window's edge, which
simultaneously indicated the minutes via a 60-minute
gauge just below the highlighted hour's digit.
The watch originally sold for 55,000 Swiss francs
($60,000),and quickly became a collectors' favorite. Felix
Baumgartner's father had urged his son to create a watch
that indicated the time at just a glance, while you were
driving a car. The UR-103.03 model did just that.
While Baumgartner creates watches fraught with technical innovations, it is the artist Frei who streamlines the
unusual technology into clean, 21st-century lines. He usually does so through comic-book-likeillustrations created
during rigorous back-and-forth discussions leading up to
production.
Hang out with Frei and it's clear he is a magpie, grabbing inspiration from everywhere he can find it; but he
partly attributes his futuristic designs to a childhood
event.
In 1977, Frei's engineer father was wor.king on spaceexploration research while at Princeton University, and
regularly sent audiotapes back to his children in Switzerland about his life in the U.S. and what he was up to. In
one tape he raved about this new film he had just seen:
Star Wars.
When the family was finally reunited back home, Frei
senior took his sons, as promised, to see the George Lucas
blockbuster. Martin was 11 at the time. "Such things stay
with you," he says. "My generation connected to the story.
It was an old story, but also a world we hadn't seen before." It's not hard to imagine, 35 years later, Han Solo
wearing an Urwerk watch.
In 2011, Urwerk's UR-110 picked up the award for
"best concept and design" at the Grand Prix d'Hologerie
de GenEwe,and in January the firm released an updated
version called UR-110 PT. The original titanium has
been shed for a platinum bezel, and it includes
many of Urwerk's witty innovations on its
"control board" seen through the panoramic sapphire crystal. An "oil change"
gauge tells the owner when the watch
is due for a full servicing; a "day/
night" indicator informs him
whether it is a.m. or p.m.; and a 60minute gauge on the right edge has
a hand that ticks off the minutes
and promptly flies back to the
original zero position on the hour.
Only 20 UR-110PT watches will be
made, and they are priced at
CHF110,000 each.
The other January release was the
UR-21O AlTiN, an acronym that
stands for a group of hard coatings made of aluminum, titanium, Cost of
and nitride that make underlying UR-210:
metals fiercely resistant to CHF145,OOO.
scratches, shocks, and oxidation.
This watch is loaded with new
doodads, including, at 11o'clock,what the firm is claiming
to be "a world-first complication"that tells the owner the
watch's ''winding efficiencyover the past two hours." While
your average time-seeker won't feel compelledto have this
information, it is precisely the kind of technical innovation
that Urwerk is becoming famous for and that
gets collectors' hearts ticking faster and
louder. Only 35 of these watches will be
made, and they are priced at
CHF145,000 each.
What's next? Urwerk has so
far studiously ignored digital
technology, which is very much
at the heart of 21st-century
aesthetics and technical innovations. Penta pressed Frei on
why Urwerk hadn't made this
logical leap, since his own fine art
relied heavily on the use of video.
Frei responded carefully that
digital technology remains a taboo
with Swiss watchmakers because the
first digital watches decimated the industry back in the 1970s;any foray by
Urwerk into this space has to been done
very carefully, he says.
But that doesn't mean it can't be done. From
what Penta could gather through cryptic remarks by
Frei and his engineer, Urwerk's never-before-seen EMCwhich will make its debut this fall with 50 pieces priced
around CHF80,OOO-couldvery well take some baby steps
into this entirely new galaxy.•