11. Nomos Tetra | The Architect


Nomos Tetra | The Architect

The architect finds his next watch purchase quite fitting as he ponders his upcoming retirement from full-time practice to dabble as an architectural consultant for his sons’ architectural firm.

Throughout his long and illustrious career, his style had been described by many as thoroughly modernist.  He was known for combining traditional architectural principles with forward thinking designs, based on simple geometric shapes.  Circles, triangles, and squares were common elements of his works.  And although his works are celebrated throughout the world of architecture, for the public, he will most likely be forever associated to his last project, which upon its completion in 1989, quickly became a landmark of the city of lights.  The construction of it was so controversial, in fact, that it triggered strong and lively aesthetic and cultural debate.  With its modernist style of the structure, it was deemed by many locals to be inconsistent with the classic Renaissance style and disregarding of the history of the museum where it was to be locate.

Despite the fact that’s he’s won virtually every award of any consequence in his art form, the architect had a habit of rewarding himself after the completion of each project, a commemoration of sorts.  As he flips through the catalogue of a new German watch brand – Nomos, a brand that was recently founded in Glashuette, just months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he quickly saw a model which amused him.  After its founding, Nomos had quite quickly built a reputation for their clean and modernist aesthetic, which was influenced by the Bauhaus purist style, a style he himself embraced.  He remembers fondly the time, upon his return to Harvard in the fall of 1945, to take up a position as assistant professor of design.  At that time, the graduate school of design was developing into somewhat of a hub of resistance to the Beaux-Arts convention, and at the center of it all, were members of the Bauhaus. 

But it is more than the Bauhaus simplicity that the watches from Nomos attract him, for the Tetra 27 also symbolizes the non-conformant, out of the box mentality which he had showcased in his own work.  After all, not every watchmaker has the audacity to make a square shaped watch, just as not every architect would dare to build a squared based metal and glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre.

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