We all know well the activities of Parmigiani’s restoration workshops, since Michel Parmigiani himself passed by the great school of restoration, and is also responsible for the fabulous collection of timepieces belonging to the Sandoz Family Foundation, a major shareholder in the Parmigiani brand. It is quite natural then that Michel, being extremely interested in the great history of watchmaking, would draw inspiration from the past for his own watches, pieces that are at the crossroads of mechanical classicism and contemporary form.
The latest in Parmigiani’s historical landscape is the Ovale watch, inspired directly by an oval pocket watch dating from 1800, which was the first to feature telescopic hands. It is a very elegant manner—and one that is visually quite attractive—of solving “the squaring of the oval”, if we might call it that. In other words, the challenge was to draw a perfect oval, around which the hands could travel in a well-proportioned manner.
As the product director at Parmigiani, Pierre-Yves Grether, himself admits, “the difficulty was not so much mechanical as it was in how to assemble the hands”. From a mechanical point of view, the minute hand is articulated in six segments while the hour hand is articulated in four segments. They both retract at 3 o’clock and at 9 o’clock and then lengthen at 12 o’clock and at 6 o’clock, driven by a cam placed directly under the dial. The most complex steps are the laser cut-outs and the assembly by axes to the nearest micron of the miniscule elements that make up each hand.
Delightfully poetic, this telescopic “complication” with its blued hands comes to life in a white or pink gold oval case measuring 52.2 x 37.88 mm, which also features a magnificent grand feu enamel dial. The power reserve indicator (eight days for the manual-winding PF 111 movement) is placed at 12 o’clock and the date appears in a window at 6 o’clock.
Source: Europa Star December - January 2012 Magazine Issue
