According to the famous Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, “une maison est une machine à habiter“ —a house is a machine to live in. The Machines of MB&F are habi­table; the stories they tell locate us in different places or different times, and sometimes different worlds. It could be said that an MB&F Machine is not worn; it is lived.

This is not always the easiest concept to grasp, because a watch is not a house, right? A house is a house, and a watch is a watch; there is no confusion, it is black and white, right? With its latest creation, MB&F further blurs the line between the two, and the result is the grey of steel rebar, the grey of freshly sprayed concrete.

In the 1960s and 1970s, an avant-garde architectural concept took over in many areas of the world and there were ‘bubble houses’ being built all over. Perfect examples of this architecture are the ‘La Maison Bernard’ house and the ‘Le Palais Bulles’ houses that belonged to Pierre Cardin —an Italian-French Fashion Designer and Icon— located in the South of France in Théoule-sur-Mer.

The ‘bubble houses’ were enabled by evolutions in building technology, using materials and methods that seemed wildly implausible at first —or at least until someone actually made a house with one. And so, it is with the MB&F Horological Machine No. 11 Architect. The new MB&F Horological Machine No. 11 Architect is literally the house that Max Büsser built. And when Maximilian Büsser, founder of MB&F, looked at one of these bubble houses from the 1960s and 1970s, he thought, “What if that house was a watch?”

‘La Maison Bernard’ / Photo by Yves Gellie

The houses that sparked the genesis of Horological Machine No. 11 Architect in Max Büsser’s mind all had an organic quality about them. They had forms that were playful, that swelled and bulged out in unexpected places. How does one begin to translate a thought experiment into a real creation? How do you answer the question of “What if a house was a watch?” The first blueprints were made in 2018 by Eric Giroud, keystone of the MB&F design process, whose architectural background clearly informs the layout of HM11 Architect. A central atrium that gives onto four peripheral rooms. Transparency and light. Interior volumes that interact with exterior perspectives. Curvilinear morphology, primitive in its affinities with the human form, futurist in its unboxed vision.

‘Le Palais Bulles’ / Photo by Charles-Henri de La Grandière

Things to Know About the Watch

The new MB&F Horological Machine No. 11 Architect is available in two 25-piece limited editions —one with a blue dial plate and the other with a 5N red gold dial plate— cased in titanium measuring 42 mm in diameter. The new HM11 Architect features a central flying tourbillon that forms the heart of the house, pushing skyward under a double-domed sapphire roof. Fittingly, for a mechanism that is spatially and functionally at the origin point of the watch, its quatrefoil-shaped upper bridge recalls the shape of clerestory windows with four symmetrical volumes reaching outwards, creating the four parabolic rooms of the house that is the HM11 Architect.

Turn the house to access each room; the entire structure rotates on its foundations. The 90-degree angle of offset between each room means that you can position HM11 with one of its rooms directly facing you, or with one of the corridors of the house running towards you and rooms obliquely to each side. This versatility in display orientation also has a practical use. HM11 Architect is an energy-efficient construction as each 45-degree rotation clockwise is signaled by a tactile click under the fingers which delivers 72 minutes of power directly to the barrel. After 10 complete rotations, the HM11 Architect is at its maximum autonomy of 96 hours. On the HM11 winding the watch can be both incidental —a secondary effect of changing the room orientation— and deliberate. The action itself is amplified; instead of turning a crown of small diameter, you turn the watch itself, adding greater weight to the relationship between HM11 and its wearer.

The Four Rooms

Time Indication

While all four rooms share a similar interior —glossy white walls with a full sapphire crystal window pane— each of them has a different function. The time room is where you go to retrieve the hours and minutes. Rod-mounted orbs serve as hour markers, using larger and lighter polished aluminum orbs for each quarter and smaller and darker polished titanium orbs for the rest. Red-tipped arrows point to the hours and minutes, providing a rare accent of color to the otherwise Spartan time room.

Power Reserve Indicator

The next room, 90 degrees to the left, is where the power reserve display resides. Following the design schema established by the time room, rod-mounted orbs are paired with a red-tipped arrow to show how much running autonomy is left in the barrel of the HM11 Architect. Proceeding clockwise, the five orbs increase in diameter until the final polished aluminum orb, 2.4mm in diameter, indicating the full 96 hours of power reserve.

Thermometer

An instrument rarely seen in horological contexts —though familiar in domestic ones— is installed in the next room —a thermometer. The HM11 Architect uses a mechanical system of temperature indication with a bimetallic strip, which may seem quaint in this age of instant high-precision electronic thermometers and thermostat-regulated smart homes. This mechanical system functions without any external energy input and is available in Celsius or Fahrenheit display variations as requested by the buyer of the watch.

The mechanical thermometer of HM11 Architect runs on the same centuries-old principle of exploiting differences in thermal expansion coefficients between materials, but its utilization here constitutes a novel and unusual watchmaking function. A bimetallic strip is formed into a compact spiral and coupled with a rack and lever such that the expansion and contraction of the spiral changes the rotational angle of the rack, moving the lever which in turn controls the motion of the temperature indication hand.

Whilst traditional bimetallic strips were made from laminated copper and steel, modern manufacturers of mechanical thermometers have improved the precision and reliability of their instruments with proprietary alloys. The HM11 mechanical thermometer measures tem- temperatures ranging from -20–60 degrees Celsius —0–140 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Crown

One last room remains a white void, its only aesthetic feature is a tiny round badge engraved with the MB&F battle-axe motif, set into the sapphire-crystal window, and that is the crown. But this seemingly empty space functions only as the time-setting crown of HM11. Pull on the transparent module, and it opens with a click. It is the front door and key to HM11; you turn it to relocate yourself in time.

An unprecedented feature in watchmaking is the see-through crown, close to 10 mm in diameter, that allows an unimpeded view directly into the movement. A crown of this size in sapphire crystal, whilst undeniable in its aesthetic impact, comes with specific technical challenges to be overcome. As the primary point of ingress to the movement, a watch crown must be equipped with gaskets that prevent water or dust particles from entering the watch and compromising its performance. Conventional watch crowns require gaskets that measure around 2 mm in diameter, which in most instances provide adequate protection. Such gaskets are primarily made from rubberized polymers, and create friction when the crown is turned, but in negligible quantities that go unnoticed during normal use.

The Movement

While the peripheral rooms of HM11 are surrounded by exterior walls of polished grade-5 titanium, the central atrium is open to the light, covered by a double-arched sapphire crystal roof. Underneath, the manual 364-part in-house HM11 Architect movement beats at a frequency of 2.5Hz —18,000 vph. The cadence of the balance of the flying tourbillon is a spectacle in true form. Plates and bridges are colored with a PVD process —a physical vapor deposition—, coming in ozone blue or the warm solar hues of 5N gold, limited to 25 pieces each for the two launch editions of HM11.

The flying tourbillon that controls the timekeeping ability of HM11 Architect is today a key part of the mechanical identity of MB&F, appearing in Horological Machines 6 and 7, as well as Legacy Machine FlyingT. Its large balance wheel boosts the overall inertia of the system, offering benefits in terms of chronometric stability, but tourbillons —and flying tourbillons in particular— are vulnerable mechanisms, susceptible to shocks that can interfere with performance. Rather than applying additional shock-proofing elements to individual watch components, HM11 incorporates a full-system dampener, consisting of four high-tension suspension springs that sit between the movement and lower-case shell.

These are not simple coiled springs made from wire, but custom springs laser-cut out of a low-carbon high-hardness steel tube with a chrome finish. The specific alloy composition and crystalline structure of this steel provide exceptional resistance to wear, while its finish and cylindrical form impart aesthetic value —despite the fact that the springs are completely hidden from view. Such springs are used nowhere else in modern watchmaking except at MB&F and are derived from technologies designated primarily for the aerospace industry.

The Case

The materials chosen to represent the two launch editions of HM11 Architect are titanium and sapphire crystal. Both are known for being extremely challenging to machine, such that it was only within the last two decades that their use became feasible in watches of complex form. The lower half of the HM11 case is a highly three-dimensional Grade-5 titanium shell with different inner and outer surface profiles. The upper caps of each of the four HM11 rooms are machined separately since they can be affixed only after the movement has been installed.

Close to a week is required to complete the HM11 case composed of 92 parts, comprising all the operations of milling, finishing, and quality control. Despite its tri-dimensional, architectural conception and the complexity of its movement, the HM11 case surprisingly measures only 42 mm in diameter. It sits sleekly and comfortably on the wrist, thanks to the curved case feet that are also the strap attachment points. These allow the watch to fit a variety of wrist sizes —and also provide stability when the case is turned to wind the barrel.

In Horological Machine No. 11, a conventional gasket sized in proportion to the crown five times bigger would have generated so much friction that the crown would essentially have braked and been unusable. Instead, two sets of gaskets are used, similar to a double airlock security system in spacecraft or submersibles.

Towards the outer edge of the watch, a large low-friction gasket creates just enough of a seal to stop dust from entering via the sapphire-crystal window. A watertight gasket, much smaller in diameter, is located closer to the center of the movement, surrounding the crown axis. A total of 8 gaskets are dedicated to the sapphire crown alone. Ensuring the integrity of the case and the movement within are in fact a total of 19 gaskets, necessitated by the complexity of the case and its various external components.

The largest gasket used in HM11 Architect is of O-ring construction, shaped in all three dimensions and placed between the case and the bezel. A custom mold was cast for this one gasket; together with the 18 others, it delivers a purpose-engineered solution as a guarantee that the HM11 house remains safe from the elements, with a water resistance rating of 20 meters.

The Horological Machines of MB&F have established a reputation for increasing the sophistication of shaped sapphire crystal components used in watchmaking, and Horological Machine No. 11 is no exception. There are six externally facing sapphire crystal components in the case of HM11, the largest of which consists of two separate sapphire crystal domes stacked concentrically to form the transparent atrium roof of HM11. Dome skylights feature prominently in 1970s residential architecture, a result of that period’s fascination with injection molded acrylics and adventurous design.

A standard watch with a power reserve of 48 hours requires between 20 and 30 full turns of the crown to be fully wound. With HM11, its 96 hours of power reserve can be completely rewound after just 10 full clockwise rotations of the case. Relocating the winding action from a small-diameter component like a crown to the case itself also raises the upper limit of torque you can apply to the winding mechanism. It’s simple physics — increasing the diameter of a rotating element reduces the energy required to turn it. This means that the mainspring barrel of HM11 Architect can be rewound more directly and more quickly.

On the Wrist & Price

On the wrist, the MB&F Horological Machine No. 11 Architect wears smaller than its actual size and quite ergonomically despite its protruding rooms. While the 23 mm height of its case could be perceived as extremely thick, the curved design of the watch makes it appear less tall. A true feat of horology with three indications and a winding system as unique as it gets. What does it feel like to wear a ‘bubble house’ on the wrist? Incredible!

The MB&F HM11 Architect is delivered on a white rubber strap —texturized-like fabric— for the blue model and khaki green for the red gold model and equipped with a titanium tang buckle. The strap is very similar in looks to that of the HM8 Mark 2.

Sticker Price $230,000 USD. For more info on MB&F click here.