Diamond Age: The Harry Winston X F. P. Journe Opus 1 Resonance

The Harry Winston Opus series came to an end – a permanent one, as far as I can tell – with the release of the Opus 14, in 2015, but for fourteen years before that, seeing the year’s new Opus watch at Baselworld was one of the big highlights of the watchmaking year. The Opus series was the brainchild of Max Büsser, who was CEO of Harry Winston Rare Timepieces from 1998 to 2005, when he left to start MB&F (prior to his stint at Harry Winston, he’d worked at Jaeger-LeCoultre). The horological landscape was very different in those days, to put it mildly – JLC was still a fairly small outfit, although it had been acquired by the Richemont Group in 1999, in an extremely complex chain of events, but it was clearly destined for great things as the international market for watches continued to expand.

At Harry Winston, Büsser, in a move that foreshadowed the founding of MB&F, decided to create a series of watches in which Winston – at this point, still owned and controlled by the founding family; the Swatch Group would acquire the firm in 2013 for $1 billion – would collaborate once a year with a hand-picked independent watchmaker, who would essentially have carte blanche in terms of design and execution. The Opus series collaborators reads like a Who’s Who of early 20th century independent horology – Vianney Halter, Antoine Preziuso, complications specialist Christophe Claret, Andreas Strehler, Greubel Forsey, and URWERK were all early collaborators. The watches were generally extremely ambitious technically as well as aesthetically, so much so that they were often barely finished in time for the show, and as they were sometimes right at the limit of what was possible technically, they could be quite temperamental (I may be one of the few living humans who has actually seen the Opus 11 do its thing).

Nonetheless, they were something which has become rather rare in today’s somewhat risk-averse world of luxury watchmaking – they were daring, and while you could make an argument for at least a few of the series representing the irrational exuberance of pre-2009 financial crisis watchmaking, they were an awful lot of fun to cover. The very first of the entire series, the Opus 1, was a collaboration with none other than F. P. Journe, who in 2001 had two watches under his belt – the Tourbillon Souverain, and the Chronomètre à Résonance. The collaboration, which is supposed to have begun as a result of a chance conversation between Büsser and Journe at an elevator at Baselworld, in 2000, consisted of a very small group of watches. Six Opus 1 watches were made with movements from the Chronomètre à Résonance; six were made with movements from the Tourbillon Souverain, and finally, six automatics were made with a five day power reserve – a considerable achievement at the time, as the movement was a wristwatch-standard 30mm in diameter, with just a single mainspring barrel.

Design differences between individual watches mean that each one in the series were essentially unique pieces. Two – just two – of the Opus 1 Resonance watches were delivered in gem-set platinum cases, and we have one of those two for this installment of AWAW.

The design is classic late 20th/early 21st century Harry Winston, which means that it’s a bit of a love-hate affair (the triple-tongued lower lugs in particular are a bit of a deal breaker for some people. They don’t bother me in the slightest now and they certainly didn’t in 2001) but there is no denying the fact that this pre-Swatch Group piece of high jewelry watchmaking is qualitatively as good as it gets. The stones, as you might expect from a company that gets a shout out in “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” and which had Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton eating from the palm of its hand, are impressive in size and clarity and obviously are informed by the late Harry Winston’s belief that fewer bigger stones are better than a lot of little ones.

If you’ve never seen this watch before and your impression of F. P. Journe is based on familiarity with his elegant, but generally classically designed and fairly restrained collections, this Opus 1 is something of a shock. It is, however, through and through an F. P. Journe mechanically, and the movement is identical to the caliber used in the original Chronomètre à Résonance.

One point worth noting is that this movement is actually an early Journe brass movement with rhodium plating – Journe didn’t begin making movements in gold (which has for many years been one of the signature features of his watches) until several years later, and of course, any early Journe watch with a brass movement tends to attract the interest and attention of Journe’s collectors.

If I live to be a thousand I will never not find the whole idea of a resonance watch endlessly fascinating and this one is no exception. There are several different kinds of watches with more than one balance, including Dufour’s Duality and Greubel Forsey’s Double Balancier, both of which work by averaging the rates of the two balances via a differential (the idea is that variations in rate between the two balances will tend to cancel each other out and at least theoretically, you ought to get a more stable rate that if you had only one balance).

Resonance watches on the other hand, work (or so the theory goes) by coupling the two balances in some way that allows the frequency of the two balances to synchronize. The phenomenon was first observed by the Dutch scientist, physicist, and horologist Christiaan Huygens, in or around 1665, in a couple of pendulum clocks which he had mounted on a single beam. The synchronization of the pendulums (in antiphase, if you’re wondering) occurred largely as a matter of luck and later experiments, up to more or less the present day, have in fact confirmed that the phenomenon is real. Breguet experimented with resonance pocket watches and was surprised to find that the effect had nothing to do with the balances coupling by air turbulence, after observing the effect in watches held in a vacuum chamber, as well as in watches in which a thin steel blade separated the balances. As implausible as it seems, the tiny forces transmitted by the balances through the movement plate, via variations in balance spring tension, appear to be enough to couple the balances, as Breguet discovered. He famously wrote, in an undated note, “This appears to be absurd, but experiment proves it a thousand times over.”

When I first heard about Journe’s resonance watches, I have to admit that I was pretty skeptical. I finally realized, though, after reading George Daniels’ notes on Breguet’s experiments with resonance in The Art Of Breguet, that Journe had essentially followed exactly the same principles and a deep dive I got into last year on the available experimental literature seemed to confirm the phenomenon as well.

This is one of those watches that not only represents a great deal of interest in itself, it also represents a revolutionary moment in the history of modern watchmaking. It’s an early example of the fascination with collaboration which has become business as usual, and it’s also one of the earliest forays by Max Büsser, former enfant terrible and now institution, into experimentation with both collaboration, and with disrupting conventional codes of fine watchmaking design.

I wonder very much whether or not this sort of collaboration could happen at all today. In 2001, Journe was of course an independent and remains one, but Harry Winston was as well and today, I can’t think of any major jewelry house which also continues to invest in technical innovation in watchmaking. Harry Winston still very occasionally produces high complications but has largely gotten out of that business, and Cartier, after a relatively brief but to me, still fascinating excursion into really groundbreaking high complications, has rediscovered its roots as a house primarily of horological design; Van Cleef & Arpels has in the past done remarkable things with its so-called Poetic Complications, but as with Cartier and Winston, the environment which made it possible for yearly collaborations like the Opus series is long gone and unlikely to return.

One major exception is, of course, the recent collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Akrivia – this combination of a major international luxury group with a highly regarded independent watchmaker is all the more striking for the degree to which it is a departure from business as usual in modern watchmaking.

The Harry Winston Opus 1 Chronomètre à Résonance is a beautiful anachronism, but it’s more than that. It’s a symbol of a period in modern fine watchmaking when the sky really seemed like the limit and during which there was a spirit of experimentation and a love for innovation for its own sake, which we have I think somewhat lost in the modern watchmaking landscape. When it came out, the resonance complication from Journe was barely a year old. Today, this version of the Opus 1 looks undeniably unusual to the eyes of the modern enthusiast, but if you ask me, that is a feature, not a bug. It is an absolutely undiluted representation of the best that the two collaborators could bring to the table – and all of it midwifed by Max Büsser, one of modern horology’s greatest matchmakers.

See it here