The new [Re]Master watch is bold, angular — and a masterpiece

One of the big beasts of the horology world, the independent Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet is adept at blending the traditional with the contemporary. Take, for example, its manufacture in Le Brassus, which lies in the heart of the Vallée de Joux in the Jura mountains. The building is a seamless expansion of its historical premises, where the founders — antecedents of the present owners — set up their workshop in 1875. Rising unobtrusively from the ground behind the original structure is a spectacular spiralling modern glass pavilion with views over forests and slopes that houses the Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet.
Inside the manufacture, Sébastian Vivas, Audemars Piguet’s heritage and museum director, is looking at some standout designs from the company’s 20th-century archives, in particular from the decades prior to the 1972 launch of its first luxury sports watch, the Royal Oak, which has dominated the brand ever since. In the first part of the past century Audemars Piguet created many distinctive timepieces of beauty and imagination with complementary technical prowess. A number from the Fifties and Sixties are giddy leaps of horological fantasy — a tribute to those times when watches were made as one-offs or in very small numbers. One of these pieces, Vivas explains, is “definitely inspired by brutalist architecture, with its straight lines and monumental 3D shapes. From the front,” he describes, “it’s a combination of rectangles and squares. From the side, it’s a UFO.”
It’s this timepiece that has been the inspiration for the Audemars Piguet team in creating the second in its [Re]Master series, following the limited-edition launch in 2020 of a reinterpreted 1943 chronograph. The new piece is not a copy but a tribute; it’s more of a modern riff on the idea of the watch. It was chosen as the most representative of its period and was the all-round favourite of the team.
Like brutalist architecture, where the use of raw concrete afforded freedom for striking angles and asymmetry to impose radical silhouettes on the landscape, it’s all about shape and new materials. The original watch was created in 1960, when the brutalist movement — think the Barbican and Southbank Centre in London, or the Unité d’habitation mass housing complex in Marseilles by Le Corbusier, the godfather of the movement — was gaining traction. Patrick Moser, an art historian and curator of Le Corbusier’s Villa Le Lac on Lake Geneva, sees something of a brutalist revival happening today.
But actually there’s nothing brutal about it. The name of the movement was coined by a British journalist writing about the Swiss-French architect’s buildings. “It’s because Le Corbusier talked about béton brut — raw concrete in French — and the word was a bit of a pun on the horror with which the new architecture was met. It should be called ‘rawism’,” Moser explains.
Talking of vocabulary, edgy, in all senses of the word, is a perfect description of the [Re]Master 02 self-winding watch. The 41mm asymmetric rectangular case is robed in Audemars Piguet’s new proprietary 18-carat brushed sand gold alloy, with a tone that shimmies between pink, grey and white, depending on the light. The Bleu Nuit Nuage 50 dial is divided into 12 triangles decorated with a blue linear satin finish that varies in shade, changing in intensity according to the light from midnight to bright azure.
Perhaps the design element that most defines this piece is the sculptured sapphire glass, which bends at an improbable angle over the dial, creating a sharp gradient as it reaches the edge of the right side of the case, exaggerating the elongated rectangular shape. Lucas Raggi, the company’s research and development director, says that one of the team’s greatest challenges was “to get the precision of the angle, then to make it waterproof. Making just one piece of glass takes a few days.”
The watch’s vintage aesthetic is teamed with a very modern hour and minute in-house movement — and there’s no doubting its extraordinary wrist presence. It’s not for the faint-hearted. With this suave new model, available in a limited edition of 250, the [Re]Master series is established as a collection in its own right, offering contemporary reinterpretations of watches that defined their era. audemarspiguet.com