Materials, textures, construction, expression: A Brutalist watch on your wrist

It’s an odd question, when you think about it. Can a luxury watch be Brutalist? Some have a basic practicality in their ancestry — watches that originated in times of warfare, for example, were engineered for keeping time in the most hostile conditions. You could call them utilitarian, perhaps.

But Brutalist? Not only do many of them pre-date the term itself, but they struggle to evoke the very specific style that we associate with the movement, either in their original form or their present-day, more luxurious guise. Then you have the more opulent end of the spectrum, closer in aesthetic to a rococo state ballroom than a concrete car park. There’s nothing brutal about a Bovet or a Breguet, except perhaps occasionally the price.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) defines Brutalism as ‘a style with an emphasis on materials, textures and construction, producing highly expressive forms’. That sounds a bit closer to home, horologically speaking — but it’s also quite broad.

The material in question is usually concrete (beton brut being the French term), as beloved of architects like Le Corbusier who in a curious coincidence — for our purposes at least — was born in La Chaux de Fonds, the Jura town best known as the cradle of traditional Swiss watchmaking. And the ‘emphasis on construction’ tended to mean exposed air vents and chimney stacks. Watchmakers like showing off their movements, but again, it’s not quite the same thing.

So why are we even asking the question in the first place? If there’s so little common ground between the massive, slab-sided form of the National Theatre and the polished flanks of a Rolex Day-Date, why connect the two? Because despite the potential chasm between them, several influential watchmakers have in recent times paid direct tribute to Brutalist styles, creating watches — and in one case, an entire brand — that they say are inspired by Brutalist architecture.

At the same time, we have also seen a spike in demand for blocky, angular, asymmetrical designs in the vintage world, such as the Rolex King Midas, a five-sided irregular dress watch with a tapered bracelet, first introduced in 1964.

The most high-profile modern example has come from Audemars Piguet, with its [Re]Master 02, which it labelled ‘a tribute to Brutalism. The watch is based on a design from 1960 known as reference 5159BA, and features a lop-sided, sharp-edged case shape with a multi-faceted crystal display (so unusual in its dimensions that AP had to carve out a slice from the inner left hand side to allow the minute hand to rotate properly).

It’s definitely a ‘highly expressive form’, to return to RIBA’s words, and anyone who has worn one will confirm that it is surprisingly massive — another Brutalist trait, and not an easy one to execute in wristwatch form. Texture is represented too, in its brushed ‘sand gold’ case, but pulling at this thread slightly undoes the 02’s Brutalist leanings, because like all fine watchmakers, Audemars Piguet takes particular care over the delicate surface finishing of its cases (and movements) and that’s rather at odds with brutalist notions of rough, crude exteriors.

Another brand making a direct connection to Brutalist architecture is Toledano & Chan, the New York and Hong Kong indie start-up whose debut design, the B/1, is a direct homage to the Met Breuer building in New York, and specifically its asymmetric extruded windows. Founders Phil Toledano and Alfred Chan bonded over a love of Brutalism, among other things, and make perhaps the most credible link between a watch and the aesthetic.

In doing so, however, they aren’t taking an overly literal approach: the B/1 is still luxurious in familiar ways, from its bracelet polishing to its lapis lazuli or mother-of-pearl dials. ‘Architecture is highly adjacent to watch nerdery,’ says Toledano, and it’s clear that the watch design blends the two passions. The B/1 has also attracted its fair share of comparisons to the King Midas.

What about less retro-focussed brands? Richard Mille, whose watches typically use unconventional materials, exposed mechanisms and idiosyncratic shapes in the service of an aesthetic that’s more future-industrial than Brutalist, recently released an updated version of its RM 16-02 Extra Flat that it says ‘reinterprets the brand's well-established aesthetic codes, showcasing a resolutely Brutalist style with its straight lines and monolithic structure.’

From the front at least, the watch appears not to have a curved line to its name, although of course the requisite wheels and gears are still present. It has redesigned the movement’s dial-side plates, come up with a new typeface, and even re-routed the traditional minute track along a zig-zag path: the end result does rather look like an aerial view of a Brutalist city plan.

Other Swiss brands, or watches, possess elements that nod to Brutalism without going the whole way. Patek Philippe’s Cubitus is sufficiently rectangular and emphatic, but far too conventionally decorated; some small independent brands like Kollokium, Ochs & Junior, Lebond and Alto all flirt with various Brutalist-lite notions like rough textures, geometric cases, asymmetric shapes and minimalist blank surfaces, but none could truly be said to channel a Brutalist spirit.

Perhaps the conclusion is that luxury watchmaking can never quite overcome the ideological gap between its devotion to precision and adornment and real Brutalism’s rigid, undecorated principles. But the fact that watchmakers are even trying has given us some fascinating results.