Cool Hunting
The Chromachron by Watchismo
In 1971, Tian Harlan, architect, engineer and artist, developed the communication system "Chromachron" (Chroma=Color and Chronos=Time) that, as was his hope, visualizes time with less rigidity. A rotating disk with a pie-shaped cutout revolves over a colored time zone (each color represents an hour) to approximate time, gauging rotation by fluid motion without demarcation of minutes or seconds. Pieter Doensen describes the Chromachron in his book Watch: History of the Modern Wristwatch as the "anti-stress watch," freeing us from the "dictatorship of exact time." Originally conceived as the "Colour-Time" clock sculpture at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Tian created over 100 variants of the watch (and clocks) through the eighties.
This entry posted on 30 November 2006 at
5:26 AM
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Victor Vasarely Op-Art Watch
Op-Art pioneer Victor Vasarely was profoundly influenced by Bauhaus, constructivism, cubism and surrealism. He began his unmistakable geometric abstraction from the 1930's through his heyday of optical illusion of the sixties and seventies. Late in his career, Bulova produced a series of wristwatches with Vasarely's artwork on the dial and engraved signature on the caseback. Very difficult to find, one of the more interesting...
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I was lucky enough to be one of the first people in the world to see the latest from Maximilian Büsser & Friends last week. Max and Stephen Hallock of MB&F met me for breakfast at NYC's Brasserie to unveil the most amazing of their Horological Machines yet. I hate to use one word to describe the HM3 Sidewinder and Starcruiser but here it...
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