URWERK UR-10 Spacemeter: Measuring time and the distance to everything
URWERK has never been a brand afraid of bending reality, but the new UR-10 Spacemeter may be its boldest twist yet. This is an URWERK with hands, subdials, and a round case—three things you almost never associate with Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei’s Geneva atelier. Yet under that deceptive simplicity lies one of the strangest and most poetic complications ever made: a wristwatch that measures the Earth’s movement through space.
The UR-10 isn’t a chronograph, a calendar, or a regulator. Its three subdials are astronomic instruments. One, labeled Earth, tracks every ten kilometers of our planet’s daily rotation. Another, Sun, records every thousand kilometers we cover on our orbit around the star that sustains us. The third, Orbit, synchronizes both journeys—rotation and revolution—into a mechanical echo of planetary motion.
Flip the watch over, and the caseback extends the metaphor. A peripheral hand circles a 24-hour scale to mirror Earth’s full rotation. One side reads clockwise for rotation, the other anticlockwise for revolution—a cosmic reflection of how we move through space whether we notice it or not.
Baumgartner credits the inspiration to a family heirloom: a mysterious 19th-century Sandoz pendulum clock that tracked planetary distance instead of time. “My father gave me a clock with hands that didn’t tell time,” he said. “That paradox is what gave birth to the UR-10.”
Technically, the Spacemeter is as radical as it is romantic. The UR-10.01 caliber, developed with Vaucher Manufacture, is a self-winding movement with twin barrels and a patented dual-turbine rotor. Its skeletonized LIGA wheels weigh less than an eyelash, and its thin 7.13mm titanium-and-steel case is screwed together laterally—a nod to Gérald Genta’s structural minimalism.
This isn’t a watch for someone who just wants to tell the time. It’s for the kind of person who wonders where time comes from in the first place. As Martin Frei put it, “The UR-10 is a philosophical reflection on our place in the universe.”
Limited to fifty pieces—twenty-five in titanium, twenty-five in black—the URWERK UR-10 Spacemeter is priced at 70,000 CHF before taxes.