Time machine

Architectural Review, The, August, 1997 by Penny McGuire

The Swatch Timeship, a new store for the Swiss watchmakers, has opened in New York off Fifth Avenue, very near the new Nike store (AR May 1997). Both shops have been designed to dazzle and entertain, both sell dazzling things to a popular rather than exclusive market; and both are startling intrusions into this once staidly expensive shopping district which traditionally traded on exclusivity. The Timeship was designed by Daniel Weil of Pentagram's London practice (in collaboration with Jim Biber of the New York office), and has provided a vehicle for Weil's original and surreal perceptions which give his work an aura of alchemy.

As a business, Swatch seems to have been exemplary. It produces watches that work and are inexpensive, and it makes use of talented artists and designers. Swatch watches are diverting, desirable and of-the-moment. Originally sold as disposable watches, they are now sought by collectors precisely because designs represent moments. Early designs and special editions by designers such as Alessandro Mendini and Matteo Thun are particularly sought after, as are those by various artists including Keith Hating, Annie Leibowitz and Yoko Ono. You can see a changing exhibition of these watches in the Swatch Gallery on the top floor of the new store. Since 1994, Well himself has been design consultant on packaging for the irony series of meter watches. The new store, he explains, is 'machinery with personality', like a Swatch watch - and, come to that, like Weil's delicately surreal radios-in-plastic bags designed in 1981.

Design of the Timeship plays upon the character of the objects for sale and the nature of analogue time. The store is on three levels of a building, formerly occupied by Chanel, on East 57th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Its presence is announced by a big glazed facade that, rising the full height of the store, is divided into three vertical panels by a frame of textured stainless steel coloured bright blue. Behind the biggest central panel floats the face of a blown-up 'Jelly' watch, three metres in diameter, which has become the parish clock. The gaps between treads of the ground floor staircase allow a projection surface, so that illuminated, constantly changing images visible from the street give intimations of what is inside.

The store is planned like a piece of machinery with distinct functioning parts stacked one on the other, but connected by pneumatic glass tubes which visibly convey a moving stream of watches. (This is the system that is used in factories and laboratories to transfer samples from one place to another.) Mounting the stairs you are accompanied by the moving watches, and this pervasive sense of motion is reinforced as you move through the store, by use of reflective materials - textured stainless steel, aluminium and mirrored glass; by video images, flashes of colour, and by the witty, decorative displays of watches.

Weil has captured the ethos of the firm admirably-and Swatch has been clever in choosing its architect. If the interior, its furniture and fittings, have been designed with light-hearted Pop-Art intelligence, the planning has been infused with a metaphysical imagination which has produced a surprisingly logical division of functions.

With more than a touch of Alice's White Rabbit about him, Well attributes a different measure of time to each level. It is most hectic on the ground floor animated by people and busy sales dispensed from long elegant counters that float above a terrazzo floor coloured blue - 'the colour of time and space'. At the rear is a double-height space and an exhibition of classic Swatches.

Time slows down on the first floor where Dr Swatch provides new parts and explanations about their workings on videos installed among the pneumatic tubes. Time becomes more leisurely still in the gallery on the second level. Here too you can sit on brightly coloured stools at a bar - the Swatch Runway - order a coffee and wait for the watch you have chosen to be delivered by tube, its arrival announced by flickering numbers behind the counter.