Pritzker Prize Winners Design Watches as Well as Buildings

The commissioning of architects to design watches has been a factor a minimum of because the Fifties. In more moderen instances, some manufacturers have requested winners of structure’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, to design a timepiece.

So far 10 of the 53 recipients of the award, given yearly since 1979, have taken a horological detour a minimum of as soon as, the newest being the Canada-born U.S. citizen Frank Gehry who received in 1989.

Within the early 2000s, a Fossil collaboration used Mr. Gehry’s handwriting to create an LCD font for a digital watch. This previous March he entered into excessive horology’s world of sophisticated timepieces by designing the dial of the $935,000 43.8-millimeter Louis Vuitton Tambour Moon Flying Tourbillon Poinçon De Genève Sapphire Frank Gehry.

Mr. Gehry, 95, who lives in Santa Monica, Calif., is famous for his designs of the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. He wrote in an e mail that watchmaking and structure “each assist us synchronize with the world we reside in and make clear the lives we reside.”

It was the curved glass on the Louis Vuitton Maison Seoul that impressed his contribution to the complicated Tambour mannequin.

The store has a facade harking back to weightless, floating glass sails and the watch case and dial are minimize from a single 441-pound block of sapphire crystal; the paper-thin dial alone taking about 250 hours to craft, first utilizing pc numerical management machines adopted by delicate hand sprucing, all carried out at Louis Vuitton’s La Fabrique du Temps specialist watchmaking middle in Geneva.

“I like the problem of engaged on such a small scale,” Mr. Gehry stated. He referred to as the design “quite simple, however the best way the sunshine performs on the shapes makes the watch ever-changing.”

Very similar to his curvy buildings.

“It doesn’t matter what you’re designing, it begins with understanding the objectives to your shopper and for the customers,” Mr. Gehry wrote.

“However all alongside, you because the architect need to have the dream imaginative and prescient in thoughts,” he wrote. “It’s important to know the place and find out how to compromise alongside the best way to maintain the integrity of the design in tact.”

One other Pritzker winner, Edouardo Souto de Moura, 71, of Portugal, who acquired the prize in 2011, says it was his love of watches, machines, and vehicles that made him say sure when Asier Mateo, an architect and founding father of the Barcelona-based model Lebond Watches, requested him to design the model’s second watch.

Mr. Mateo stated that every one Lebond designs have been made by architects who got free rein on design and supplies. They solely want to incorporate a motion they’re given and each the Lebond model identify and the architect’s surname on the dial, he stated on the manufacturing facility in Bienne that makes the watches.

That led to the creation of the Lebond Souto Moura, 2,700 euros (about $2,900), which was launched in March. It’s a slim (7.6-millimeter) watch with a 38.5-millimeter microsanded titanium case housing a cream-colored, lacquered dial with black stick fingers. The elongated minute hand is accompanied by a shorter, thicker hour hand.

“Watches and buildings are each machines that mould our lives,” Mr. de Moura wrote in an e mail. “The distinction between a watch and a constructing is scale,” he continued, including that the watch was impressed by his precept of “minimal materials for optimum perform.” (That concept may also be seen in his streamlined crimson concrete design for the Paula Rêgo Museum in Cascais, Portugal.)

Spherical was his apparent alternative of form for the watch, since, as he put it, “I’m not taken with squaring the circle.” The form is emphasised by its lack of lugs, an inspiration from so-called flying saucer watches the place the strap is invisibly hooked up to the bottom of the watch. To have a fast and straightforward learn of the time, “whether or not writing, drawing or driving,” Mr. de Moura opted for tilting the entire watch clockwise 30 levels so 11 is on the prime.

One other winner from Portugal was Álvaro Siza in 1992. He’s nonetheless lively at 90 as an architect — and as a watch designer.

In 2022 he completed his first challenge in the US, a high-rise tower in New York Metropolis, and in 2023 the Lebond Siza (€2,700) was launched. The 41.5-millimeter watch incorporates a sq., microsanded titanium case tilted 45 levels, with 12 positioned within the prime nook. Obtainable with a white or black dial, the design was impressed by the sq. Leça swimming pool in Portugal that he designed in 1966.

Rafael Moneo of Spain received the Pritzker in 1996. However the designer, now 87, of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles and the Audrey Jones Beck Building, a part of the Museum of Advantageous Arts, Houston, was not a time-telling novice. He had designed clocks for the Logroño Metropolis Corridor and the Atocha Station, each in Spain.

Each emphasize midday as being the summit of the day, surrounded by “the hours associated to day by day exercise, distinguishing between morning and afternoon,” he defined by e mail.

To take care of a design dialog with these clocks, he opted for a 30-millimeter sq. stainless-steel case and Roman numerals for the Cauny Moneo (€195), a part of the Cauny’s the Architects of Time Collection.

The design technique of the time-only watch took the higher a part of a 12 months, he wrote, describing the work as stunning: “Working with millimeters and tenths of a millimeter when accustomed to considering when it comes to centimeters and meters, has been a disciplined train. Nevertheless, it was no shock to see, again and again, that the sense of proportion has at all times been current and makes one assume that each the clock and the watch got here from the identical hand.”

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, co-founders of the Japanese structure studio Sanaa, collectively received the Pritzker in 2010 for his or her work with distinction, gentle and transparency in initiatives such because the New Museum in New York and the Rolex Studying Middle in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Ms. Sejima, 67, relished the problem when Bulgari requested her to create a look ahead to its Octo Finissimo assortment.

“It has been inspirational in how it’s potential to use ideas which can be normally utilized to structure to such a small object,” Ms. Sejima wrote in an e mail. Her design, launched in 2022, is a mixture of the spherical and the octagonal.

The stainless-steel watch has a small seconds subdial at seven o’clock, mirror-polished components and a sapphire glass stuffed with mirrored dots.

“I wished to make this relation between the round and octagonal face extra natural and softer by means of the selection of mirrored round dots that create a continuing and dynamic alternate between the watch itself and all the things that surrounds it,” she wrote.

Different Pritzker laureates who’ve designed watches embrace Tadao Ando (Bulgari), Zaha Hadid (ACME Studio and Puls), Oscar Niemeyer (Hublot), Jean Nouvel (Maurice Lacroix), and Renzo Piano (Swatch). Pritzker laureates who designed buildings for the watch business embrace David Chipperfield (Rolex), Toyo Ito (Hermès) and Shigeru Ban (Swatch Group).

To Ms. Sejima, watches and structure have rather a lot in widespread. “Like in structure,” she wrote, “in a watch all the weather are linked collectively, and every hyperlink is prime to realize the general steadiness and functioning of the system.”