Antarctique Tourbillon Secret Alloy

THE IN-HOUSE CALIBER 9: DEFINED BY PURITY OF LINE

Reflecting Czapek’s unwavering pursuit of Beauty, the purity of the mechanism became the main design driver for the new in-house movement, Czapek Calibre 9. The fundamental principle was that that the three key elements – tourbillon, gear train and barrel – should be revealed on the dial side, perfectly aligned on the vertical axis and appearing as airy and light as possible. The open-worked flying tourbillon appears to hover between the main plate and dial, directly connected to the gear train, which floats in the centre of the dial beneath an extremely long and finely curved minutes bridge. The barrel dominates the upper section of the dial, floating in an aperture beneath an open-worked bridge.

MECHANICS AND AESTHETICS: AN IMMUTABLE BOND

Czapek has named the new pattern Singularité – from the astronomical term singularity, meaning those places in the universe where the standard laws of physics break down, making space and time infinite and undifferentiated – best exemplified by black holes.

The pattern may look deceptively simple but is very difficult to execute: unlike a classical guilloché pattern, in which the guillocheur cuts lines at different angles that always start from a single point, in Singularité, the starting point moves with each passage of the lathe.

REDESIGNING THE CASE: AN ODE TO TRANSPARENCY AND CURVES

The case has been redesigned to echo the curvilinear aesthetic of the mechanism and dial. Taking the curved glass box principle of the Antarctique Rattrapante as the starting point, the front and back sapphire crystals have been subtly raised. On the reverse side, this creates the impression that there is no bezel and, indeed, the engravings that would normally appear on a caseback bezel are done inside the crystal by metallisation – executed in mirror style so as to read ‘true’ from the outside.