I don’t think a lot of people have fully realised the intricacy of the philosophy behind the URWERK UR-100V. At least, I haven’t heard or read anyone really talking about it. Perhaps we’re just so used to how creative URWERK is that we don’t even think about it anymore. This is a good problem for URWERK to have, but I feel like I need to highlight it anyway, especially in light of their newest iteration of the UR-100V, nicknamed Stardust.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the watch is gem-set, a relative rarity — though not completely unknown — in the URWERK collection. That said, this is the first time that URWERK have used the technique known as snow-setting in their main collection. (Earlier this year, a trio of limited-edition UR-100V timepieces featuring this gem-setting technique was released to commemorate the 15th anniversary of longtime retail partner PMT The Hour Glass in Thailand.)
Snow-setting is differentiated by its use of varying sizes of gemstones, placed not in regular lines and formations like you would normally expect, but in a completely random configuration with no discernible repeating patterns. This requires the experienced hand of a master gem-setter, who can create a tapestry of stones without a pre-determined pattern, placing the gems so close together that they appear to be a single scintillating mass. It’s simply stunning. However, I implore you to move past the “Oooh, shiny!” reaction that has been programmed into human nature (as so excellently demonstrated by my baby niece, who will grab on tenaciously to anything sparkly, even if it happens to be attached to your ear). For there is so much more to the UR-100V “Stardust” than that.
URWERK’s co-founders Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei, respectively master watchmaker and artistic director of the brand, cite the stellar inspiration for the UR-100V, alluding to Carl Sagan’s famous quote that we are all “made of star stuff” and drawing parallels between the randomness of snow-setting and the ordered chaos of the stars. I agree with most of that, with one slight deviation. It is not chaos that we see in the disordered distribution of stars in the sky — it is entropy.
An article examining a new watch release is probably not the right place to go into the nuances of meaning between chaos and entropy, so let’s just say it’s a technical difference related to similar but distinct concepts in physics and leave it there for now. Entropy is a word that crops up in every single science-based theory of how the universe came together, how the Earth was formed and how it came to support life. And that is why I appreciate the snow-setting technique and how much it resonates in context of this space-age timepiece.
The diamonds — all 400 of them — provide a dazzling backdrop to the two cosmic indications on the upper two quadrants of the watch. These two indications consist of simple apertures that allow the minute markers attached to the outgoing and incoming hour modules to be viewed for 20-minute blocks. Nominally speaking, they indicate the distance travelled by the Earth around the Sun in 20 minutes (35,740km) and the rotational distance of the Earth on its own axis in 20 minutes (555km). But I don’t like thinking of them that way, because it frames these indications as something that happens way out in space, with no relevance to us. I prefer to think of these indications as translations. They take something we are utterly familiar with — the banal, quotidian timeframe of 20 minutes — and translate that into a context most of us never really think about, the rotation and orbit of the Earth around its star, our Sun.
When we put it that way, the signature wandering-hour display of URWERK is an evocation of the divine entropy that guided the creation of our solar system and set our planet into motion. And, by the way, did you know that the word “planet” has its roots in the Greek word for “wanderer”?
I don’t want to get carried away. Obviously, the URWERK UR-100V possesses nowhere near the complexity and awe-inspiring beauty of the universe. But it certainly does a laudable job of approximating it, in a 41mm by 50mm case.
