BILL, Max. FORM, FUNCTION, BEAUTY = GESTALT. Architectural Association Publications, London, 2010, pp 140 ‐142. WHAT I KNOW ABOUT CLOCKS (I963), I have a weakness for clocks, which must come from the fact that one of my grandfathers was a watchmaker and we had beautiful old clocks at home, carefully regulated by my father so that they always kept perfect time. As a child ‐I particularly loved two of these timepieces: a wall‐clock and a pocket watch. The wall‐clock was in a modest empire style. I especially liked it because its face, with its figures and hands, was unusually graceful, while its pendulum and weights were particularly simple. This wall‐clock had something about it of those precision time‐keeping instruments that you find in factory gatehouses. Only it was more finely crafted. The pocket watch had a special feature that never failed to delight me. When my father pressed its top, it chimed the hour and the quarter‐hours lightly and softly, with a gently purring precision. The face and hands of this watch were also especially beautiful in terms of their configuration and fabrication. Any clocks or watches that I've since come across have always been set against these two 'ur‐clocks’ from my childhood, and only rarely have I found one that could compare. Even in the locus classicus of the clock, Switzerland, it has been difficult to find anything new that has satisfied me nearly as much. In exhibitions I've been asked to curate, for example, at the Milan Triennale, I got into the greatest difficulties with pocket‐ and wristwatches: I liked the cases of some of them, the faces (minus the numerals) or the hands of others, but were all these elements related to each other in a harmonious way? Rarely, perhaps never. (Only the very expensive watches made by Vacheron & Constantin, or Audemars‐Piguet, came up to my aesthetic standard, and it’s only in the last ten years that an acceptable cheaper watch has come onto the market, the still consummate Juvenia.) All of them, however, had what seemed to me an essential flaw: their faces had no numerals. I could never be happy about that.
To say nothing of wall‐clocks. The ones at Swiss railway stations were, and still are, the best. There’s no messing around with them; it's all about legibility. It was only through a kind of a misunderstanding, an accident, that I came to design clocks. I was still at Ulm at the time, helping to build up the School of Design, but on the way to getting myself booted out of the place. One day a man turned up and said he’d come on behalf of a watch manufacturer to ask whether I'd consider designing watches for his company: fashion watches. He’d seen an article with pictures of some sculptures I'd made and thought they could perhaps be the basis for a few sensational pieces of jewellery ‐ a kind of endless ribbon with a built‐in mechanism and the whole shebang. I was less than enthusiastic about the proposal. But since l already had a drawing of my 'ideal watch’ in a drawer somewhere, I explained to my amiable visitor that it would give me the greatest pleasure to produce some watch designs for him. Except they wouldn’t be quite what he had in mind: no fashion watches, no seasonal throwaway trinkets. On the contrary, these would be as far removed from fashion as possible, as timeless as they could be without forgetting the time. A brief was then established. The first item on it called for a ‘kitchen clock with timer’. I set my students the problem. There were a few fixed parameters ‐ it was to be ceramic, the mechanism was already there, the timer too ‐ but something new had to be created out of them. One criterion, however, was non‐negotiable: the thing had to have numerals — hours on the clock face and minutes on the timer. Why? Because the kitchen clock is often the only wall‐clock in the house. Children learn to tell the time from it, learn their first numbers, the order of hour and day. And it had also to be as bright and cheerful as kitchen crockery. I made it light blue with a white dial and a white metal bezel. The firm asked for some other colour combinations. l considered a white one with a gold bezel just about tolerable, but in the end the light blue version prevailed. This outcome was initially not so certain. When we’d finished the prototype I'd taken it to the manufacturer in the Black Forest and the chief executive looked at the thing not with reluctance but (it seemed to me) no great enthusiasm. He took it away with him to show to the mayor of the town. The mayor eventually signalled his approval and some members of the board liked it too, so we were able to go ahead. Since then thousands of these clocks have been sold. And now, after six years of production, it's having a mini‐makeover to iron out some small imperfections. After this came other models satisfying further requirements by the company as well as my own desire to make clocks with numerals on them. Out of this came a wall‐clock and matching wristwatch. l am pleased with the electric wall‐clock because it is one of the clearest of its kind, with the big hand precisely marking the divisions of the minutes and the small hand indicating the hours. But the wristwatch corresponds even more perfectly to my ideas, with its steel casing, its silver dial, its differentiated scale with minute marks that at the same time count the seconds, and its full crown of figures at the top of its face. And what particularly pleases me about this wristwatch are the fine luminous hands and the luminous points that mark the quarters, with a double point at the top, at the full hour. Little things? Perhaps. But I believe that so much in life depends on these little things; and much also depends on the time that is measured by the clock. And that is why —along with the very able technicians and workmen of