MB&F HOROLOGICAL MACHINE NO. 7

Jelly shot MB&F HOROLOGICAL MACHINE NO. 7.  aximilian Büsser’s watchmaking inspirations normally spring from the obsessions of his youth – exotic cars, spacecraft and flying machines. The latest model from his collaborative atelier MB&F (mbandf.com), however, Büsser explains, is “the first time I’m not going back to my childhood, the first time it’s not a form of psychotherapy-related product”. The Horological Machine No. 7 (or HM7 for short) was inspired by more recent experiences. “My wife and I were on holiday at a resort in the Emirates a few years ago, and she didn’t look when she ran into the sea, and to her unpleasant surprise, it was full of jellyfish,” Büsser says. “She ran out of the water – but not fast enough, which provided a stinging memory of that week.”

Büsser continues: “I was stuck on this beach staring at these damn jellyfish, and they’re really fascinating – you’ve got this transparent object, a sphere with a brain of a sort, then the filaments, and I thought it’d be cool to do a watch related to that. My wife and I, we didn’t have much to do, just sitting on the beach – which is a luxury I don’t have often – so I just started thinking about it and the idea began gelling in my mind. You could have this sphere of sapphire with a ‘brain’ ticking underneath.” Initially, Büsser says, he and his designers conceptualised a watch that was a ball of sapphire. “But then we thought, let’s do something that’s not expected. Since it’s the first time we’ve created a waterrelated piece, let’s have a diving bezel that looks a bit like a life buoy. Everybody in my team was looking at me like, ‘What are you doing, Max?’ Because this is not a diver’s watch.”

Why make an aquatic-looking timepiece that you’d be mad to go swimming in? (It’s delicate, fantastically expensive and only water resistant to 50 metres.) “Because watches are objects which give time, but which are not intended to give time,” Büsser posits. To him, watches are not tools to gauge the hour – they’re mechanical art. This is MB&F’s specialty, across its watchmaking division, its collaborative gadgets (such as the space-age music boxes it builds in conjunction with Reuge, or sci-fi clocks dreamt up with l’Epée 1839), and its M.A.D. (Mechanical Art Device) Galleries in Taipei, Dubai and Geneva. Now also available in titanium with green sapphire crystal bezel and green lume (in a limited edition of 50 pieces, priced approximately $145,000), the first two iterations of the HM7 – in titanium with blue bezel and rose gold with black bezel – were launched last year. Büsser says he was surprised by the positive reception. “To be honest, I was bracing for major criticism on this piece ... Most of the journalists we showed photos to were like, ‘Umm, weird’. That’s often the case with our pieces – if you look at the photos, you’re like, ‘Excuse me, but what the hell is that? I don’t get it.’ Then you see the real piece and it’s ‘Wow!’ … That’s the story of our life.” – CHRISTIAN BARKER

Sources: Robb Report Australia, July 2018

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: