April 01, 2019

AHEAD OF THEIR TIME

by AHMED SEDDIQI & SONS

Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons celebrates the avant-garde watches that point to the future of wristwatch design and technology

What is an ‘avant-garde’ watch? The term pops up a lot in watchmaking. Taken from the French for ‘vanguard’ or ‘advance guard’, it originally appeared in its recognised form in the first half of the 19th century when it was used by reformers to describe the power of art in leading social change.

In watches, social change is not strictly top of the agenda (although sustainability is coming) – instead, avant-garde describes designs and technologies that break with convention and propel watchmaking forward.

Come the turn of the Millennium 20 years ago, Swiss watchmaking was moving into a period of unprecedented prosperity, but it was also looking stale. Since then, a new generation of brands, designers and innovators has entered the industry (not just from Switzerland), and with them have come some of the most startling, most avant-garde watches ever seen.

Here are six to get your head around, each breaking new ground and paving the way for the future of fine watchmaking.

Richard Mille RM70-01 Alain Prost

Richard Mille produced its first watch in 2001 with the promise of putting ‘a racing machine on the wrist’. By plucking materials and technologies from elite motor sport, the brand’s watches have created an entirely new dynamic in watchmaking – as well as a new value sector. The company has also partnered with some of the most famous names in racing, including four-time F1 world champion Alain Prost. The watch carrying his name is less a racing watch and more a cycling watch: the Frenchman is a keen rider. The Dali-esque RM70-01’s asymmetrical, ‘indestructible’ Carbon TPT case houses a high-tech tourbillon movement that also powers a mechanical odometer that can tally distances up to 99,999 km.

Hublot MP-05 LaFerrari Sapphire

Hublot, which means porthole in French, may have been founded in 1980, but it only sprang to life in 2005 with the launch of the Big Bang, arguably the most important watch created this century. The success it brought empowered Hublot to invest heavily in innovation, manufacturing and sponsorships. One of the watches that best brings that trio to life is this epic sapphire-cased piece made to partner Ferrari’s LaFerrari hypercar. Designed in parallel with the car and bearing a strong resemblance to an engine bay, it features a suspended vertical tourbillon and a vast (and until recently record-setting) 50-day power reserve.

MB&F Horological Machine No9 ‘Flow’ Road Edition

The 21st century revival of mechanical watchmaking prompted a new generation of watchmakers to go it alone and found their own independent watch companies – independent not just financially, but also philosophically. At the vanguard of the vanguard is MB&F, short for Maximilian Büsser and Friends. Max, as he’s known, has delivered a striking portfolio of sculptural watches that bear little, if any likeness to common watch design conventions. One of them is this, the HM9 ‘Flow’ Road Edition, a piece with a grade 5 titanium case inspired by the curvilinear, aerodynamic forms of automotive design in the 1940s and 1950s. The movement has two clearly visible balance wheels that operate independently and feed into a differential, creating a more accurate average that’s then relayed on the dashboard-clock-inspired dial.

Greubel Forsey Double Tourbillon 30° Technique

Englishman Stephen Forsey and Frenchman Robert Greubel were so convinced the limits of mechanical watchmaking remained far beyond what had already been discovered that in 2004 they set up their own company to prove it. Their first invention was the Double Tourbillon 30°, which, as the name suggests, has two tourbillons (an anti-gravitational device that makes a watch more accurate). By placing one inside the other and rotating them at different speeds (the outer completes a full rotation every four minutes, the inner in one), they improved timekeeping by averaging out errors caused by gravity. It’s esoteric stuff, advancing traditional watchmaking in ways that two decades ago would never have been thought possible. So acutely crafted and finished are Greubel Forsey watches that fewer than 100 are made each year.

Urwerk UR-111C Iron

As well as rethinking watch design and watchmaking, some of the independent brands have rethought how you display the time, too. The vast majority of pieces in Urwerk’s industrial-looking watch collection tell the time without the aid of hands and hour markers, instead employing displays such as that found in the UR-111C Iron. Minutes are twice, digitally on the right and via a linear retrograde display in the centre; the hours digitally on the left; and the small seconds through an aperture on top of the watch. The hours ‘jump’, advancing forward in a single leap on the hour. To adjust these, you have to pull out a lever in the side of the case that activates the roller positioned top and centre. Aesthetically and functionally the UR-111C is a work of science fiction, and yet under the skin it’s a paean to the principles of micromechanical watchmaking.

Ressence Type 3

The advance of fresh-thinking watch companies this century has shown that not all great minds in watchmaking are Swiss. Far from it, in fact. Ressence, founded in 2010, is the brainchild of Belgian industrial designer Benoît Mintiens. His gloriously inventive solution to telling the time and the basis of the ‘Type’ series is called the Ressence Orbital Convex System, or ROCS. It involves a series of rotating discs that replace conventional hands. As if that wasn’t sufficiently avant-garde, the upper half of the Type 3 is flooded with oil, a counter-intuitive twist designed to neutralise the visible distortion created by a domed sapphire crystal. And how does a dry movement drive an oil-filled display? Via magnetic transmission – an extraordinary innovation in its own right. The overall effect is a watch that looks simple, despite being loaded with complex, even ingenious engineering.