A new art — very Swiss — of sculpting the passing of time
At the creative fringes of timepiece design, powerful and singular "sculptures" are emerging, constantly renewing our idea of what the fine arts of watchmaking mechanics can be. When it is beautiful and Swiss, it is even better. Let it be said: the future of Swiss watchmaking still has a great deal of future ahead of it!
In the conventional sense, on a clock or a watch, the "analogue" hours are indicated by a hand moving along a graduated path. This was already the case with water clocks in antiquity. It is also the case with our contemporary dials, where hands generally "go round in circles" — but this is not an obligation, as demonstrated by the A5-01 clock from Around Five, conceived and realised by a Swiss team (Antoine Lorotte and Philippe Vallat, the Swiss creators of FiveCo and PilotDesign). Their idea, currently the subject of a Kickstarter campaign: a linear reading of time integrated into a beautifully designed object that imposes a different idea of the passing of time. The curves evoke, in a stylised way, the path of the sun across the sky, with an alternative display of the time "to the nearest five minutes" — this approximation inviting one to savour a slower sense of time and enjoy the present moment. Carpe diem: one will have understood that design here becomes the philosophical key to an anti-utilitarian worldview, at the opposite extreme from the growing pressure of seconds counted out by digital machines.
Everything is Swiss in this table clock — concept, design, engineering, fabrication, and assembly. Even the awkwardness of this somewhat naive crowdfunding campaign is Swiss. Around one hundred pre-orders will be needed (CHF 890 during the subscription period, for a final retail price of CHF 1,210) for this "sculpture of time" project to take shape — and it is off to a good start, having already found around thirty contributors on the first day of the campaign (CHF 30,000 "pledged"). Around Five inscribes itself with intelligence and creativity in the great tradition of beautiful timepieces as renewed in Switzerland over more than four centuries. Between Alps and lakes, time is a passion and design a religion…
