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When Watchmakers Team Up With Pritzker Prize Winners
Architects say they find a certain affinity between designing major structures and smaller items to wear on the wrist.
Reporting from Bienne, Switzerland
The commissioning of architects to design watches has been a thing at least since the 1950s. In more recent times, some brands have asked winners of architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, to design a timepiece.
Thus far 10 of the 53 recipients of the award, given annually since 1979, have taken a horological detour at least once, the most recent being the Canada-born U.S. citizen Frank Gehry who won in 1989.
In the early 2000s, a Fossil collaboration used Mr. Gehry’s handwriting to create an LCD font for a digital watch. This past March he entered into high horology’s world of complicated 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 noted for his designs of the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. He wrote in an email that watchmaking and architecture “both help us synchronize with the world we live in and clarify the lives we live.”
It was the curved glass on the Louis Vuitton Maison Seoul that inspired his contribution to the complex Tambour model.
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