The co-founders of Urwerk, Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei have always focused on one basic need when it comes to designing their timepieces: the interaction between the owner and the watch. Keeping that in mind, the new UR-111C is their answer with an engineered twist to the piece. The horological instrument now includes a linear track of the display slanting diagonally across its aperture allowing the rotating cylinder which carries the helix marker, to rotate 300 degrees about its axis.
“Wearing a fine mechanical object is a source of pleasure and pride,” declares Felix Baumgartner. “There has to be a strong bond with a mechanism that merges into your wrist and communicates with you. A mechanical watch is like the first steps towards enhanced intelligence: a machine that becomes part of you and which gives you information in return for energy. It’s an exchange. You take care of your watch and it will provide you with a lifelong service.”
Unconventionally conventional to the Urwerk ideology, the new piece displays the minutes in two different ways – both linearly and digitally. The digital seconds are mounted alternately on two tiny wheels: 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 on one wheel, and 5, 15, 25, 35, 45 and 55 on the other. The seconds numerals look strangely close as they pass across a circular window in sinuous progression as if in an alternative visual range by a dense cluster of precisely aligned optical fibers, known as an image conduit, positioned a tenth of a millimeter above the numerals – marking a world Première in the watchmaking area!
Click on the video to view the new UR-111C.
