New Richard Lange Tourbillon "Pour le Merite"

Unadorned performance has remained the guiding principle of modern day German look at design and style at any time considering that A. Lange & Sohne helped to revive the tradition within the mid-1990s; but the industry's newly reemerged preference for perform over form has drawn a certain sum of criticism from observers. Perhaps in response to this perception, the usually staid, Glash?¡ì1tte-based company has introduced an element of whimsy to some of its far more recent watches. The movable dial within the new Richard Lange Tourbillon "Pour le Merite," for instance, is the horological equivalent of a lace garter. This function does serve a functional purpose: A section of the dial retracts when the hour hand strikes 12 o'clock, exposing the entire tourbillon mechanism, and snaps back into place as the hand strikes six o'clock. But the design's operational flourishes and titillating view from the movement clearly trump its utility.

The Richard Lange Tourbillon, however, is not the first timepiece from A. Lange & Sohne to exhibit the house's imaginative flair. In 2009, the company's new item development team, led by Anthony de Haas and Tino Bobe, startled observe collectors using the Zeitwerk, an unusual digital display driven by a mechanical movement. Since then, the team has continued to uphold Lange's reputation for practicality and top quality while, at the same time, creating watches that convey a sense of the unusual.

In recent years, the company has enhanced its capabilities inside the development of chiming mechanisms, such as moment repeaters, through its restoration work on a turn-of-the-century Lange grand complication; Bobe and de Haas decided to incorporate 1 of these vintage-inspired complications into their most modern day view. "For our first entry into the field of acoustical watches, I think most folks expected something traditional, like a three-hand observe," says Bobe, the company's director of research and development. "Our priority was to generate a positive surprise." The result of their labors is the Zeitwerk Striking Time, a sonnerie au passage that neatly transfers some in the energy stored for digital show disks to the chiming system, which sounds the passing hours and quarters.

A similar historical twist informs the aperture and movable dial around the Richard Lange Tourbillon "Pour le Merite". The three-circle regulator layout in the dial is borrowed from a design by 18th-century German watchmaker Johann Heinrich Seyffert, who would recognize not only the exterior in the new piece but also the spirit of its inner workings. "Everyone on our team knows we don't want to create useless complications," says Bobe. "It is significantly a lot more challenging to style throughout the parameters of our brand."

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