KOLLOKIUM

Kollokium is not a brand. As pretentious and cliché as that sounds, it’s true. kollokium is a project-based platform. Its purpose: exploring new possibilities in watchmaking from alternative perspectives. Kollokium was founded in 2020 by three friends who were brought together in the world of watchmaking.

The Dial

A graphical representation of a ripple? A miniature cityscape? The dial is actually a 3D reconstruction of an intentionally pixelated image rendered by Adobe Illustrator. If you squint your eyes, you can clearly make out 12 “maxi” hour markers, with batons for the cardinal hours and circles for the others.

Set with 468 individually hand-applied cylindrical hour markers (is that a world record?), which come in six different diameters and heights. Each of these cylinders is sandblasted, then filled with white Super-LumiNova (also by hand) that glows with a blue emission.

The Case

There’s beauty in rawness and imperfection. And that’s precisely what we wanted to convey through Projekt-01, starting with the case.

Without trying hard to be outlandish for edginess’ sake, the case is literally crafted like no other watch out there. Forged from 316L stainless steel, the case is not made using typical milling and machining processes at all, though the process is in fact industrial and rather old-school: die casting steel. Why? Well, because they said it couldn’t be done. And because the desired result was one where the case would boast practically no finishing or embellishment, and instead feature a uniform, industrial heavy duty steel tool-like appearance with a specific texture that can only be produced when injecting molten steel into a cast form. It’s neither matte nor frosty, but somewhere in between. And as rough as it looks, it’s unexpectedly soft to the touch. Because of the die-casting process, the edges and angles are slightly rounded off, while the steel has a surface that is neither entirely matte nor sparkly.

kollokium ≠ watchmaker

For Projekt-01, Kollokium has chosen to use Swiss movement manufacturer La Joux-Perret’s G101 automatic movement with a power reserve of 68 hours, so you can take it off on Friday and wear it again on Monday (though why anyone would want to remove it at all is beyond us, but hey). Since Kollokium had nothing to do with the movement, it was decided to leave it completely unbranded and unadorned. It’s not like you can see it anyways ¯\_(ツ)_/¯