Felix Baumgartner grew up in Schaffhausen, the son of a watchmaker who specialized in restoration. By his twenties, he was already handling vintage IWC minute repeaters and Breguet pocket watches, learning how old masters thought about energy and resonance. Martin Frei’s path couldn’t have been more different: trained in art and film, he was working in graphic design and sculpture, steeped in science fiction and visual story telling. When the two met in the mid-1990s, the idea of building watches together seemed unlikely. Yet out of that collision came Urwerk.

Their first pieces, the UR-101 and UR-102, looked like time machines — featuring wandering-hour satellites gliding across semicircular dials, housed in cases milled by hand in Zurich. But it was the UR-103 in 2003 that really changed the conversation: a spaceship of a watch with satellite hours hidden beneath a sculptural shield, its display read like instruments on a cockpit panel.

UR-103

Urwerk never stopped experimenting. The UR-210 introduced the “winding efficiency indicator, ”a gauge measuring how much energy the wearer generated. The oil-lubricated rollers of the UR-111Credefinedhowacrowncouldwork.Andthe AMC paired a wristwatch with an atomic clock — a 21st century echo of Breguet’s Sympathique clocks. For Baumgartner and Frei, independence has never been about working alone. It has meant building a language of watchmaking no one else dared to speak.

UR-210 (©Revolution)