If you like minimalist wristwatches, then you should know about the watch inspired by the Bauhaus school of design

Mint

a day ago

I am part of a generation that has seen the advance of technology change the world radically, especially in communications. Just 40 years ago, it was difficult to get a landline phone connection, and if you did, calling people up was a ritual that involved speaking with switchboard operators. Between my high school years and early 30s, a span of just 15 years, we went from the novelty of wireless 'brick phones" to the call-and-text-only feature phones to the earliest smartphones, a positively dizzying pace of change.
As a natural progression, it was inevitable that smart devices would take up residence on our wrists (as they soon will around our necks, in our glasses, and who knows where else) and start challenging the hegemony of wristwatches, these quaint circular throwbacks that do nothing else but tell the time. But these holdouts from the vanishing analogue world have been surprisingly resilient.
Why is this so, I have often wondered. One answer could be that wristwatches have a simplicity and single-minded focus on doing just one thing consistently. In doing so, they perform an invaluable function of focusing our brains. We quickly glance at our wrists when we need to tell the time. For a fleeting collection of moments each day, when we are telling the time, it is the only data that our minds are consuming—in those moments, the constant hum of digital distraction briefly takes a backseat.
Also Read 5 legendary wristwatches that went to space
For that simplicity to win out, it must be allied with good design. Of course, wristwatches are noted for their refined design language, and there is even an annual industry award—the Le Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève or GPHG—for the best-designed watches in different categories. Feting watch design makes sense because the need for clean, clutter-free design has been paramount since the beginning of wristwatches in the 1920s and 30s. In part, this is because 20th-century wars needed them. The first wristwatches were improvised pocket watches strapped on the wrists by soldiers in the First World War.
By the time the next World War rolled around, wristwatches had become the de facto method of daily timekeeping, and brands had developed watches for every combat situation. From field watches for the army to aviation watches for the air force, wristwatch design allied durability, water resistance, and legibility into an unbeatable combination. During the economic boom of the 1950s and 60s, a new type of wristwatch came to the fore—dressy timepieces that would be perfect for the office worker.
Also Read 8 best GMT and Worldtimer watches for globetrotters this summer
The buzzwords for this paradigm change were simplicity and minimalism. Watch dials started reflecting both of these attributes and clean time-only dials became the bread-and-butter of the industry. At the most, watches would make space for a date complication, but anything else was too much. With this simplicity came a new focus on watch case design, with several original design thinkers making an effort to make the wristwatch into a work of industrial art that would reflect the radical new ideas sweeping through the design world.
Many iconic wristwatches developed in those decades still rule the market (at least their modern versions do), be it a Rolex Submariner or an Omega Seamaster, or flagship models from IWC, Longines, and Breitling.
One watch that comes directly from the world of art and design is the Junghans Max Bill. Its story begins not on the wrist but in the kitchen. In the late 1950s, Swiss designer Max Bill—already a leading figure of post-war modernism and a graduate from the modernist Bauhaus school of design—created a sleek kitchen clock with a built-in timer for the German watchmaker Junghans.
It is an elegant object with clean, minimalist lines, and it quietly embodied the Bauhaus ideal: form following function with clarity and grace. For Bill, timekeeping was not just a mechanical concern but a philosophical one. His lifelong fascination with time—nurtured early on by a watchmaker grandfather—would soon evolve into one of the most enduring collaborations in modern horology.
Also Read 5 wristwatch YouTube channels every horology enthusiast should follow
Bill was a polymath equally at ease as a painter, sculptor, architect, and designer. He was fascinated with time, which he inherited perhaps from his grandfather, a watchmaker. 'Little things? Maybe. I believe that our lives depend on little things," he once said. 'And a lot of that time, the watch measures for us. That's why I'm so obsessed with making beautiful, precise timepieces."
A post shared by @dshx_pictures
Following the clock's success, Junghans invited Bill to translate that ethos onto the wrist. He agreed—on one condition: he would not follow fashion but create something original. He was only interested in design that was stripped of trends and was informed instead by utility and elegance. The first Junghans Max Bill watches appeared in 1961 as a perfect circle of form and function.
The visual language is instantly recognisable: a watch that is nearly all-dial, with slender, squared lugs; delicate lines for the minute tracks, thin lume-filled hands; Roman numerals as hour markers, in a font that Bill designed, that seem to float above an uncluttered dial. Whether quartz or mechanical, hand-wound or solar-powered, the watch remains deeply rooted in Bill's Bauhaus ideal: beauty as an aspect of function, but never its master.
And yet, it's more than Bauhaus purity. The Max Bill doesn't just sit on your wrist—it teaches you to see. A product of industrial design that's earned its place in New York's Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) permanent collection, the Junghans is the Platonic ideal of the wristwatch. It is a design that demonstrates that restraint can be radical and that utility can be lyrical. It's a watch that tells the time, and makes a significant but subtle statement while doing so.
Handwound is a monthly column on watches and watchmaking.
Also Read 6 things to keep in mind while buying a wristwatch