The UR-100 is URWERK’s simplest watch—‘simple’ being a relative term, of course. It still has the brand’s signature ‘wandering hours’ satellite indicators, and it still flirts with imaginative cosmic inspirations thanks to the additional ‘distance travelled on the Earth as it rotates’ and ‘distance travelled by the Earth as it orbits the sun’ indicators. But it is one of the brand’s slimmest and smallest offerings, and it the one that looks closest to a watch in the classical sense.
Since its introduction in 2019, it has been a platform for some expressive experimentation in terms of material and design. The UR-100 Electrum was one example, its namesake gold-and-silver alloy a material known throughout history but not so much in watchmaking, and offering a distinctive shine. The more recent UR-100V Ultraviolet was another, a bold and eye-catching outing in purple.
This year is no exception. The UR-100V Magic T (CHF58,000) from earlier in 2023 is one of these ongoing offerings, an exploration of a full titanium case and bracelet. The collection has seen such single-material focus before, including the UR-100V Full Titanium Jacket of 2020, but that was all matte, while the Magic T’s sanded shotblasted titanium has more of a luminous gleam to it. The result is monochromatic, minimalist—as far as the unabashed technical complexity of a URWERK timepiece can be, anyway—and has a refined, industrial-chic aesthetic.
As with previous versions of the UR-100V, it sports the self-winding UR 12.02 calibre, an iteration from the original that brought the sweeping hour markers closer to the minute track for enhanced legibility. The watch is a fairly modest 41mm in width while being just under 15mm long and with a thickness of 14mm.
