Maximalism And The Repeater: Girard-Perregaux’s New Minute Repeater Flying Bridges

I sometimes wonder whether or not the decade long run of record breaking in ultra thin watchmaking has not sort of ruined the category for everyone, at least for the time being. The reason this has occurred to me has to do with the general qualities of newly introduced highly complex watches over the last 18 months or so. Pieces like the new Blancpain Grande Double Sonnerie represent complicated watchmaking’s tradition of celebrating complexity for its own sake, as does the De Bethune x Louis Vuitton Sympathique.  The maximalist approach is broadly speaking, one of two directions in which you can go when you design a complicated watch; and over the course of the history of watchmaking you can see both poles manifesting themselves, sometimes even in the same watchmaker’s body of work. We have for instance Vacheron’s ultra-thin minute repeater caliber 1731, but on the other hand this is also the company that has given us the gigantic Berkley Grande Complication. These two approaches have more or less run in parallel for most of the history of watchmaking, or at least since it became technically possible to make extra flat watches after Jean-Antoine Lépine developed the full bridge movements that bear his name, starting around the 1760s; and during roughly the same era which saw the heyday of elegant, extra flat, Art Deco influenced wristwatches, Patek was also working on the Henry Graves Supercomplication, which was delivered in 1933.

This brings us to Girard-Perregaux’s latest tourbillon minute repeater, the Minute Repeater Flying Bridges.

The Minute Repeater Flying Bridges is the latest in a long line of tourbillon wristwatches featuring the double arrow bridges characteristic of Girard-Perregaux’s higher end watches; the company used such bridges extensively in its competition pocket chronometers and tourbillons, and the design for a movement with three parallel bridges was first introduced by GP in 1867, with a patent granted in 1864. In the 20th century, Girard-Perregaux focused less on highly complicated watchmaking in favor of practical daily wear watches, and high precision watchmaking (its Chronometer HF remains one of the most interesting of the first generation of high beat wristwatches) but in 1981, Girard-Perregaux produced a very limited edition of its famous “La Esmeralda” tourbillon, with three golden bridges, which was followed by a wristwatch version in 1991 and the characteristic bridge design has been part of the company’s modern design vocabulary ever since.

The new Minute Repeater Flying Bridges’ caliber GP-9530 is quite large, at 43.55mm x 10.75mm, or 17 lignes and it takes up the entire interior volume of the watch case, which is 46mm x 17.90mm and made of pink gold. The movement has an interesting configuration, which departs quite a lot from a conventional repeater, or even a conventional repeater with tourbillon (if there is such a thing; I suppose the closest thing is the Patek 5539, but that’s hardly a conventional watch; it is however, an extraordinarily discreet one). Cal. GP-9530 runs in 47 jewels with a 60 hour power reserve and is a 3 bridge design, although the third bridge is on the back of the movement, where it supports the lower pivot of the tourbillon cage. The mainspring barrel is on the horizontal centerline of the watch, as is the micro-rotor, with the repeater mainspring barrel at 12:00. Above the repeater mainspring barrel, you can see the two hammers flanking the block at the base of the gongs. In a conventional repeater, the gongs, hammers, and fly governor for controlling the speed of the chimes are normally the only parts of the repeater mechanism visible and then only through the back; modern repeaters, however, do occasionally put the gongs and hammers on the front for visual interest. This placement also improves sound propagation as the gongs are directly under the front sapphire.

The new movement appears to be a descendant of an earlier hand-wound minute repeater tourbillon with a similar configuration, which was introduced as the Minute Repeater with Golden Bridges in 2015, when it was a competitor at the GPHG.

These pics are of a Japan-market limited edition version but the layout is the same, and it was already a quite large watch, at 45mm x 15.91mm. Amazingly enough, for a fractional increase in size, GP has managed to fit in the microrotor and automatic winding system, and the view from the back, while it shares some of the layout of the earlier caliber GP-9500, has been extensively reconfigured.

The mainspring barrel in cal. GP-9500 is slightly above the horizontal centerline while as noted, in the new caliber GP-9530 its right on the horizontal midline, as is the center axis of the micro-rotor, and the position of the governor appears to have been shifted a bit closer to the 12:00 position in order to give enough clearance for the micro-rotor. The earlier movement has conventional gongs held in place by screws. The mainplate has been dramatically pared down in cal. GP-9350 as well, to a circular bridge transected by a straight bridge on the vertical axis, and the composition’s very visually powerful.

The repeater slide is set into the case flank but as the movement proper is so to speak, suspended inside the case, the slide acts on a flange which is part of the repeater spring barrel winding rack. You can see it moving independently back into its starting position in this video at about 1:30; tuning the gongs in the traditional way, by filing them to the correct length, can be seen at 0:40.

The one piece gong and block assembly.

The shape of the gongs reflects the GP arrowhead bridge design; the motif is repeated throughout the watch.

The general construction of the watch is designed to offer optimized sound transmission, including the placement of the gongs on the dial side and the use of titanium for the plates and bridges – titanium is a light, stiff material which transmits sound energy more efficiently than denser materials, such as brass or gold.

The lyre shaped tourbillon cage has been a signature of Girard-Perregaux tourbillons since the late 19th century. Balance is freesprung with Breguet overcoil; quality of the steelwork is exceptional; screws are black polished with beveled polished slots.

This is I think a very well thought through design, both from a visual and from an engineering standpoint. The design language feels integral to the movement, not an afterthought, and both the smallest details and the overall composition feel well integrated. The size, and the rubber strap, might give it a little bit more of a sports watch aura than you’d expect from a tourbillon minute repeater, but not so much so as to seem unharmonious with the rest of the design, and the overall effect is less discordantly sporty than it is post-modernist in spirit. And maximalism done right can have its own unique impact; sometimes you want a string quartet but sometimes you want a symphony.

The Girard-Perregaux Flying Bridges Tourbillon Minute Repeater: case, pink gold, 30M water resistant with box type sapphire crystals front and back, both with antireflective coating; 46.00mm x 17.90mm. Dial and hands, pink gold inner bezel with gold openworked hands; blue emission Super-LumiNova on the hands and dial markers. Movement, GP caliber GP-9530, 43.55mm x 10.75mm, running at 21,600 vph in 47 jewels (up from 38 in the  GP-9500, I assume thanks to the reconfiguration of the going train and inclusion of the micro-rotor winding train). White gold micro-rotor, with minute repeater, one minute tourbillon, hours and minutes. Power reserve 60 hours. Strap, fabric-pattern rubber with pink gold triple folding clasp. Price at launch, $590,000; see it at Girard-Perregaux.com.