Weekly Watch Photo – URWERK-CC1 King Cobra

The goal of our Weekly Watch Photo column: showing you exceptional pieces with superb photos, in their natural element. For this week, we knocked at the door of one of Monochrome’s favorites, a crazy watchmaker capable of totally unusual watches: URWERK. The brand recently came up with the UR-105 (their value-proposition). We also showed you two of their creations, the UR-210 and the UR-202. However, we wanted to get back in the past, with a watch presented in 2010, the so-cool URWERK-CC1 ‘King Cobra’.

You might know URWERK for the satellites or the revolving hour and minute hands, such as the UR-210, or for the control panel visible on the caseback, like on the UR-202. However, there is a watch in the collection that comes with another type of indications, removing none of the spectacular display but using linear and retrograde indications: the ‘King Cobra’, a.k.a. the CC1. To be very honest with you, it had always been one of Monochrome’s big crush and it’s with great pleasure that we feature it again.

This watch is unusual (in the best possible manner) because of its way to indicate time: the hours are showed by a jumping and rotating cylinder, the minutes with a retrograde cylinder and the seconds with a both digital and linear mechanism (The seconds are indicated by a single-coil flat spiral, trisected by three arms and having 30 numerals for every other second around its circumference. The spiral, revolving once a minute, progresses along a linear scale. The second numerals appear at two-second intervals in an aperture, while the three arms successively traverse a 20-second arc). The case has this squared, flat, angled design with digital indications that reminds us of a 1980s calculator or car stereo (you know, this graphic equalizers that were so classy on your dashboard…). Jokes apart, the result is simply brilliant and unique in the industry.

You can find some technical explanations about the URWERK-CC1 King Cobra here.

Far from being a discreet object (that’s definitely not the goal of an URWERK), this watch is massive, useless, complicated, not especially easy to read. But who cares? It’s a demonstration of modern horology by two talented men, Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei, playing the time like a partition of coolness and designing objects for the real, hardcore aficionados.

The URWERK-CC1 was a limited edition of 50 pieces (unfortunately sold-out). More on URWERK.com.