In 1997, two Swiss Germans decided a watch did not need hands, and today Urwerk remains their argument about what time should look like
“We were losing money on virtually every watch we produced,” said Felix Baumgartner with a smile that underlines the pure optimism that drove Martin Frei and himself to persevere 29 years ago, when independent watchmaking didn’t look anything like today’s trend beast.
There is a particular kind of silence in the Urwerk workshop in Geneva, and it is not the hush of a manufacture. It is the silence of two people who have been arguing productively for thirty years and no longer need to raise their voices. With one year to go until they can celebrate a 30th Anniversary, Frei and Baumgartner have produced a body of work that looks less like a catalogue and more like the collected proofs of a watchmaking theorem. A wristwatch does not need hands to tell the time. This was a radical thought in the late 1990s, when watches were still considered functional objects, but it makes perfect sense today, when tech fatigue has set in and awakened new generations to the wonder of avant-garde watchmaking.
Brass Heart readers will know the Urwerk shapes, which feel familiar today despite their alien nature. The slab-sided cases, the crown planted at twelve, and a carousel of numbered cubes sweeping past a minute scale like the fins of a submarine breaking the surface. Less often told is the story about how deliberate the whole thing was from its inception, what lies behind Martin and Felix’ ethos, and how little of it was an accident.
Felix Baumgartner came from Schaffhausen, in the northern, German-speaking part of Switzerland, where his father, Geri, restored antique clocks and where he spent his childhood among pendulums and pinions. With a completely different background, often the spark that ignites the most creative partnerships, Martin Frei came graduated from a Lucerne art school. Frei trained as a designer and leaned toward sculpture, film and the kind of industrial objects that have purpose as well as form. The duo first met in the mid-nineties, introduced through Baumgartner’s brother Thomas, and the conversation that followed was not really about watches, but about showing time without a traditional vocabulary.
The name Frei and Baumgartner chose for their newborn brand combined Ur, the ancient Sumerian city where the earliest known measurement of time is said to have begun, and Werk, the German for a piece of work, or a movement. And with two syllables, one of them archaeological and one of them mechanical, the kind of name a designer picks rather than a watchmaker, the tone was set for what the company would be: a place where the object and the idea were expected to carry equal weight. I was lucky enough to sit down with the two founders and this is the Urwerk story as told from inside the atelier.
BH: Felix, you came from a Schaffhausen watchmaking family, and Martin, from art school in Lucerne. What did each of you think the other was getting wrong about watches in 1995, and which of those arguments remain unsettled?
Felix: Martin is a free spirit. His name is “Frei” meaning “, free in German, and he has definitely lived up to it. What I have always admired about him is his ability to think without rules. At the start of a project, he simply doesn’t care whether something is technically possible or economically reasonable. He dreams first, and he dreams big. That is one of his greatest qualities, and at the same time probably the thing I challenge him on most. For Martin, a project is never completely finished. There is always one last improvement, one detail to reconsider, one proposition to push a little further. At some point I have to stop him and say, “That’s a great idea, but a totally new watch”. He was like that when we started, and I hope he will remain exactly the same until the end. A restless, boiling, completely free spirit.
Martin: Felix is a watchmaker in the deepest sense of the word. He has the character of a watchmaker. He is practical, very focused, and he can disappear into the world of a mechanism. Sometimes you can mistake that for shyness, but I think it is closer to a scientific way of thinking. He needs to be “connected” to the machine, living in his own world. He can become obsessed with a technical problem. If something isn’t working as he believes it should, he can think about it day and night. Almost maniacally. For me, the object can begin as an idea or an emotion. For Felix, that idea has to become a machine that actually works. That “difference” between us has existed from the beginning, and it is probably one reason URWERK still exists and blooms.
BH: You brought the UR-101 and 102 to Baselworld in 1997 with no marketing budget and almost no brand story. Who bought the first pieces, and when did you know if the idea would survive?
Felix: The truth is, it almost did not survive. Our first clients were essentially our family and our closest circle of friends. They were the very first people to believe in us and willing to invest in the strange UFOs we were creating. Today, of course, those early watches have become real collector’s pieces. They are little treasures, and for us they carry enormous emotional value. But back then, the UR-101 and the UR-102 were financially completely irrational. We were losing money on virtually every watch we produced. Everything was made by hand: my brother was machining and shaping the cases on our lathe – we had, of course, no CNC machines at our disposal. I assembled every mechanism myself. Our production was microscopic, and our prices were too low to reflect the amount of work involved. We were practically working for free, earning just enough to buy the precious material and components needed to make the next small series. Looking back, we were heading straight towards a wall. Today, these timepieces are iconic, cared for by real collectors, and carry deep emotional value. We “survived” because we were stubborn (I had a day job on the side to keep us going), and because we probably did not fully understand how impossible the whole thing was.
3. The satellite complication has now carried the brand for nearly three decades. What inspired its first inception?
Martin: The inspiration came from an antique night clock Gerard Baumgartner, Felix’s father, once had in his atelier for restoration. The Baumgartner told me the story behind it and I found the display absolutely fascinating. Seeing an hour literally wander across the dial was just mind-blowing to me. It immediately suggested movement rather than a static indication of time. In my mind, the connection with a satellite was almost instantaneous. An object in constant revolution, moving through space around a central body. This was almost 40 years after the launch of Sputnik. That image of a small, shining metallic sphere projected into the unknown was incredibly powerful. This shining metallic sphere projected into the universe. I started sketching immediately. What interested me wasn’t simply finding another way to display the hour. It was the idea that time itself could travel through space. That became one of URWERK’s fundamental visual languages.
4. The EMC and the AMC were arguably your most radical statements: a mechanical watch that measures itself, and one that resets against an atomic clock. Were they engineering proofs or philosophical ones, and did the market understand the difference?
Felix: They were both. They were engineering projects, but behind the engineering there was a very clear philosophy. We created these pieces out of genuine love of research. We called that branch of our work “Chronometry” because we wanted to explore new ways of achieving accuracy and precision in mechanical watchmaking. The idea was not to revisit solutions invented two or three centuries ago, like the tourbillon. We wanted to ask a different question: if a watchmaker were trying to solve the problem of mechanical precision today, with the best technologies available today, what could he do? And we wanted to approach that question without taboos.
Felix: With the EMC, we introduced electronics as a measuring tool inside a completely mechanical watch, allowing the owner to evaluate the rate of his EMC and then regulate its movement. With the AMC, we went considerably further by bringing the mechanical watch into dialogue with an atomic reference. For some purists, combining mechanics and electronics may appear almost contradictory. For us, it is exactly the opposite. The electronic is here to reveal the beauty of a mechanical movement and allow it to perform at its very best. You have to be slightly crazy to go that far simply to improve the precision of a mechanical watch. But to me, that is precisely what Haute Horlogerie should be about: curiosity, obsession and willingness to explore territory. Of course, these watches do not talk to every URWERK collector. They were not intended to. But the watchmaking community understood the achievement. Both creations were celebrated. EMC received two prizes from the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie: Mechanical Exception and Innovation. Two prizes for the same watch; it was a first. For us that recognition was extremely meaningful.
5. Martin, you’ve always described the watches as sculptures first. Has your own design vocabulary shifted from the 2007 UR-201 to the UR-120 and the Scorpion?
Martin: The UR-201 had something very architectural and mechanical about it. You could almost feel the machine pushing against the case. I was fascinated by exposed structures, tension, sharp lines and the idea of an instrument coming from another world. Over the years, I think I have become less interested in adding forms and more interested in finding the essential form. The UR-120, for example, is more mechanically complex, but visually it has a certain fluidity. The satellites open, separate and reconnect. The mechanism itself becomes part of the sculpture. With the Scorpion, there is another evolution. The object feels more organic to me. It still has the tension and the strong identity of URWERK, but the surfaces, the curves and the way the case sits on the wrist have become more sensual. I don’t think our design language has become softer. It has become more controlled. At first, perhaps we wanted to prove we were different. Today, we no longer need to prove it. That gives us more freedom.
6. The UR-Freak with Ulysse Nardin is your first limited series collaboration with another brand. What made you finally say yes, and where did you refuse to cross the line?
Felix: We had collaborated before, but mainly on pièces uniques created for the Only Watch charity auction. UR-Freak was different. It was our first collaboration with another “maison horlogère” conceived as a real series, with 100 timepieces in mind. It started simply, with a chance encounter. At a dinner, I happened to sit next to Patrick Pruniaux, then CEO of Ulysse Nardin. We started talking, and he told me about the Freak’s anniversary. The Freak already meant something to me. I knew Ludwig Oechslin’s work and admired it for many years. The project made sense. There was mutual respect and a willingness to create something neither company could have produced alone. Both identities had to be respected.
7. Around 150 watches a year built in one workshop with two founders. What does Urwerk look like when neither of you is in the building, and is that something you’re actively designing for?
Felix / Martin: From the very beginning we wanted URWERK to be an atelier made up of independent minds rather than a company built around two people giving instructions. So when Martin and I are not there, everybody knows what they have to do. More importantly, they know why they are doing it. Many team members have been with us for a very long time. Yacine, who heads our communication, has been part of the adventure for 20 years now; Hervé, who runs our Geneva atelier, has been with us for 16 years. Other team members have spent more than a decade growing with URWERK. That continuity is incredibly important. These people have not simply learned procedures; they are URWERK. Each person has their own expertise and personality, but they share the URWERK spirit. They are curious, independent, creative, and want to do things differently.
Urwerk: The Full Timeline of Watches
The Urwerk story begins in Lucerne in the mid-1990s, where Felix Baumgartner, a watchmaker’s son from Schaffhausen, met Martin Frei, a graduate of the city’s art school. Click the carousel to discover the watches that have defined that story across the decades.
