Is the Rado True Thinline Les Couleurs Le Corbusier timepiece the most award-winning watch in history? It certainly has one of the longest names. Over the past week, Rado’s timepiece took home at both the Good Design Award, here in Singapore, as well as the iF Design Award, taking its tally of award wins to well over 40 – an unprecedented feat in the watch industry and testament to the success of what is a most unique collaboration between Rado and Les Couleurs Suisse.
The latter organisation is responsible for the archive management and licensing Le Corbusier’s original palette of architectural colours, which bears the title of Architectural Polychromy. The 63 colours in Le Corbusier’s palette were selected for their mood-enhancing effects, each hue conveying psychological information, with the palette being first introduced in 1931 and extended nearly three decades later, in 1958. Today, close to a century since he first created Architectural Polychromy, Le Corbusier’s colour palette is as vibrant and aesthetically relevant as it ever was.
In Rado’s True Thinline Les Couleurs collection, the brand presents a palette of nine limited-edition watches – each representing a different of the nine groups in Le Corbusier’s original palette – in a technical ceramic fabrication. The material is lightweight yet scratch-resistant and hypoallergenic, and the injected monobloc case has the unique ability to hold the vivid nature of Le Corbusier’s pantones.
