Urwerk's sci-fi aesthetic and small-scale approach set Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei apart from the pack

It’s watchmaking, Jim, but not as we know it. Beyond the heavily adapted Swiss movements that tick inside them, Urwerk’s otherworldly mechanical creatures bear more resemblance to something out of a sci-fi film than objects that simply tell the time.

It’s hardly surprising, though. Urwerk founders Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei are happy to admit that their seminal UR-101 watch, launched in 1997, was inspired by Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon. It sounds gimmicky, but it really worked. The double-pronged nose and saucer-like haunch of Han Solo’s light-speed vessel worked perfectly in miniaturised form, as strap attachment and watch respectively.

Beyond the sci-fi comparison, the only feature of the UR-101 surviving in today’s line-up is the thing that went on to define Urwerk in the first place: wandering-hours satellites. The complication was invented in the 17th century for a Vatican City clock, then reinvented for the wrist in the early 1990s by Audemars Piguet as the Star Wheel. Hands are replaced by a semi-circular minutes gauge, across which four discs mounted on a spoked carousel successively sweep.

Three hour numerals, separated by four-hour intervals (eg 1, 5 and 9 o’clock), are marked on each of the four satellites, so when it comes back round to “0” minutes, the satellite is nudged to place the next correct hour.

Today, the closest you’ll find to Audemars’ classically styled Star Wheel is at Arnold & Son. Not that Urwerk chose to go down the traditional route. From the UR-103.3 onwards, the mechanics were exposed beneath a sapphire canopy, then evolved into ever-more balletic concepts (if you can imagine such a thing as a fighter-jet Transformer being persuaded to do ballet).

Hence, the four satellite discs became three spinning cubes with needles shooting in and out of their tips. Oil gauges were added to the case-back, alongside pneumatic turbines regulating the winding rotor. The extraordinary EMC, launched in 2013, even brought in a handcranked electrical sensor telling you how to adjust the ticking escapement.

This unabashed techno aesthetic has encouraged the likes of HYT, MB&F and MCT, yet Urwerk has stayed firmly boutique, with just 16 employees producing less than 150 pieces a year. Frei mans the drawing board in Zürich, while Baumgartner is still at the bench in Geneva – and that’s just the way he likes it. “My father was a clockmaker,” he explains. “His atelier was on the same floor as my bedroom. So from the age of three, I was already ‘helping’ him.”

After finishing at Solothurn Watchmaking School in Switzerland, he worked for complications maestro Svend Andersen (renowned for his erotic automatons – Google him, but not at work). But by the mid 1990s, he had reached a crossroads. “I’d simply been learning to be as good as other watchmakers – learning how to make a version of what has never been bettered for hundreds of years,” he says.

“As a 20-year-old, I faced a tough reality: either stop making watches altogether, or take a completely fresh direction.”

Baumgartner and Frei met at a squat party. Their dissimilarity to the hunched Geppetto stereotype is precisely why the brand’s watches are so far beyond the norm. “I was part of this arty, underground world, and so was Felix’s cousin,” says Frei. “Felix was invited to join us and celebrate New Year’s Eve. We spent hours talking, exchanging, arguing. We had two different approaches. His was pragmatic, down to earth, operational. Mine was philosophical and immaterial."

“At the beginning we were young idealists. Our aim was to unseat Rolex. We wanted to be the new conquerors with innovative creations,” he adds. Twenty years on, their latest creation pays homage to those early days, while staying true to Urwerk’s ethos of pushing forwards. The UR-105 CT Streamliner is a titanium-clad evolution of the original UR-103 driver’s watch – this time with an openworked carousel revealed by popping a hinged, striated “bonnet” (shown insets, left).

“The whole world, what we create and what nature creates, is worth thinking about,” says Frei. “In art, I can do everything. I can think about machines as Duchamp or Beuys did.”

That’s not to suggest, however, that Baumgartner’s role is to simply realise his partner’s wild imaginings. “I’ll come up with the technical idea. Then we ping-pong between the concept and the technicality,” says Baumgartner. “It can take two months or five years. The idea behind the CC1 King Cobra’s [launched in 2009] linear roller display started as far back as 1998, inspired by the speedometer in my 1960s Volvo. All my ideas come to me in everyday life, transformed from what already exists. I am quite boring, in fact.”

If boring means creating watches as mind-blowing as Urwerk’s, then we’ll agree to disagree, Mr Baumgartner. urwerk.com