Introducing: The MB&F Legacy Machine No. 1 Silberstein

The Legacy Machines are the result of a thought experiment: what would the Horological Machines look like, Max Büsser asked himself, if they had been designed in the 19th century? The results are watches that take some of the cardinal features and virtues of 19th-century watchmaking – particularly Swiss watchmaking, in terms of finish and general movement layout – and re-imagine those elements as part of a design composition that's a 21st-century meditation on horological nostalgia. The newest version of the Legacy Machine is a new twist on that nostalgia, with a design by Alain Silberstein, and, interestingly enough, some of the features of the Legacy Machine No. 1 Silberstein arose out of Silberstein's criticisms of the first Legacy Machine's design, as well as his interest in redefining its symbolic potential.

Alain Silberstein began manufacturing watches under his own name in 2012, and at the time, they were quite a breath of fresh air. His focus, thanks to his design background, was on what you might dismiss as cosmetics, but his watches, which made extensive use of simple, geometric shapes and bright primary colors, had a refreshing playfulness about them that was rare then and remains rare now. Whimsy, humor, and irony make uncomfortable bedfellows with luxury. Generally, luxury watchmaking is either loudly hyper-macho, leadenly earnest, or forbiddingly aristocratic – and there are very few exceptions to the rule. Silberstein's quirky sense of fun made his watches really stand out from the crowd, but it also made them a tough sell (appreciating humor and irony in luxury goods takes some self-confidence as well as reflective intelligence on the part of consumers) and he eventually had to close up shop in 2012.

However, one of the few exceptions to the rule that there's no humor or irony in fine watchmaking is, of course, MB&F, and in 2009, the very first collaboration between MB&F and Silberstein took place, producing the Horological Machine 2.2, known as the Black Box.

The HM 2.2 Black Box is a very interesting example of just how flexible MB&F's designs can be; the original HM 2 has an almost steampunk, Jules Verne quality; you could easily see it as an instrument in the control room of the Nautilus (or perhaps on the console of H. G. Wells' Time Machine) but it becomes a very different object as interpreted by Silberstein. The sense of playfulness you expect from anything Silberstein designs is still there, but the matte black rectangle of HM 2.2 combined with the primary colors he introduces, gives it more of a Suprematist than a Bauhaus feel; it looks like a Platonic ideal of the original design, rather than simply an interpretation.

The Legacy Machine LM1 Silberstein takes the same spirit of reductionism and applies it to a new subject – the Legacy Machine 1 – in a way that makes reductionism also a kind of critical comment on the original design.

According to MB&F, the starting point for the LM1 Silberstein was Silberstein's own feeling that the Legacy Machine 1's beautiful, curved double balance cocks, while lovely in themselves, actually interfered with the apparent intention of the LM1 to present its large, 14 mm balance, beating at a very old-fashioned 18,000 vph, in as unobstructed a way as possible. In terms of the original intention of the design of LM1 I think some degree of what, to a design purist, might be thought excessive ornamentation, is part of what the watch is all about; in the late 19th century, in Swiss watchmaking, design and decorative idioms tended towards the elaborate. And indeed in classic Swiss fine watchmaking, even today, the decorative impulse is fundamentally more Baroque than classical – an apt place, by the way, for an expression of the Baroque sensibility from a country that really had no Baroque period of its own. Does Legacy Machine 1 interfere with its own aesthetic aspirations? Maybe, but the heritage it represents was never explicitly one that sought purism – although, like any design heritage that makes ornamentation an end in itself (George Daniels wrote, in Watchmaking, that it is only when watchmakers have no real practical problems to solve that they distract themselves with a jewel-like finish) it is susceptible to reinterpretation from a purist perspective.

There are several rather radical departures from LM1 in the LM1 Silberstein.  Probably the most dramatic is the replacement of the original twin balance cocks with a single transparent cock made of sapphire. The sapphire balance cock is secured to a very large foot, which itself is held to the plate by two large screws. Visually, it's quite a high wire act; the sapphire crystal isn't completely transparent, but it's clear enough that you really do get an impression of something suspended (more or less) under the front crystal, swinging serenely back and forth.

Another major point of departure is in the sub-dials. Silberstein (again, per MB&F) felt that not only did the original twin balance cocks block the view of the balance; they also were too distracting to the eye in terms of the visibility of the sub-dials. In the LM1, there are two separate dials to show the time in two separate locations, and each one has hour and minute hands that can be independently set, from two separate crowns. Both sets of hands, however, are regulated by the single balance (via a differential that directs energy to the two sets of motion works that move the hands). To Silberstein, the balance symbolically (and, for that matter, practically) represents the division of idealized time – what Silberstein calls "eternal time" – into increments that can be meaningfully measured, and he thought to symbolize this by making the sub-dials concave in shape, so that they seem to capture time as it's broken down by the oscillations of the balance.

The end result is one of the most elaborately symbolically layered watches I've seen in a long time. Allusion and appropriation, of course, have been part of the symbolic language of MB&F since the very beginning; there's playfulness, yes, but also a nostalgia for a time, place, and frame of mind that can't be recovered, and under all the showmanship on display in MB&F's watches and their design, and presentation, there is a streak of incurable melancholy.  

The LM1 Silberstein very much finds its place in MB&F's world. It's colorful, and playful, and it's got oodles of charm, but it's also a symbolic commentary on a watch that is itself a symbolic commentary on a watchmaking tradition that in a very real sense no longer exists, except as a very highly specialized form of luxury oriented craft. You can look at LM1 Silberstein and interpret it in many different ways, but one of the most suggestive is that, in abstracting and deconstructing what was already something of an abstraction and deconstruction, it's a kinetic sculpture whose subject is the disconnect between the function of mechanical horology, and its existence as a decorative art whose utility may be both essential and totally beside the point, at one and the same time. That it has such an anthropomorphic face merely adds to the "uncanny valley" air of the watch; it warns us that in having abstracted personal time to the point that it's no longer a shared experience, we run the risk of seeing each other in an equally abstracted, and inhuman, way.

It's a relief, therefore, to find out that this android of a watch has a heart of gold. The gilt finished movement is about as un-ironic as you can get, and it seems there, at least in this version of the Legacy Machine 1, to reassure us that under the shifting sands of post-modern symbolic commentary and aesthetic appropriation, there's the very solid foundation of traditional craftsmanship after all. Though the degree of distance bridged by the movement will vary depending on the version of the watch it's in (the LM1 Silberstein is going to be made in titanium, red gold, or black PVD treated titanium) it's a gorgeous example of a kind of level of craft found today in only very few other movements – which is what you'd expect from Jean-François Mojon (of Chronode) and Kari Voutilainen, the gentlemen responsible for the original development, and finish specifications, of the LM1 movement. The beautiful, tack-sharp inner corners and flawlessly defined transitions in the finish, are in a sense what makes the whole watch – archly sly deconstructivist, post-Modernist, slightly anarchic and self-sabotaging symbolic free-for-all that it is – actually work, in every sense of the word.

The LM1 Silberstein is a limited edition of 36 watches – 12 in red gold, 12 in titanium, and 12 in PVD-coated titanium. Case engraved with a quote from Flaubert: “Le vrai bonheur est d’avoir sa passion pour métier” – “Making a profession of your passion is true happiness."

Movement, developed by Jean-François Mojon/Chronode and Kari Voutilainen; hand-wound, single mainspring barrel with 45-hour power reserve. Vertical indication of the power reserve at 6:00. Transparent sapphire balance cock, 14 mm balance wheel, free-sprung with Breguet overcoil balance spring; frequency, 18,000 vph; frosted gilt finish. Available in 18k red gold, grade-5 titanium or grade-5 titanium treated with black PVD Dimensions: 42.5 mm wide × 17 mm high. Number of components: 41; water resistance: 30 m.

Pricing: in titanium, $83,000 (both versions) and in red gold, $92,000. Visit MB&F online here.

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