For most watch brands, a new release means a new dial color, a slightly thinner case, or maybe a movement upgrade buried somewhere in the new model’s innards. For MB&F, it apparently means building a $384,000, 15-kilogram robot.
The latest creation from Maximilian Büsser’s horological concept laboratory is called the HM12 The Guardian, and it might be the purest expression yet of the ideas that have defined MB&F for the last two decades: sci-fi nostalgia, kinetic sculpture, and mechanical watchmaking pushed to the edge of absurdity. But all the brand’s expertise and passions have never harmonized as well as they do on the new Guardian. The watch started as a crazy idea hatched five years ago, according to a press release: “Wouldn’t it be cool if a watch could be the head of a robot?” (Yes, it would.)
While there is a robot we have to talk about, let’s not forget that at the center is an entirely new watch. The HM12 is a titanium wristwatch designed to function as the “head” of a robot companion developed with Swiss clockmaker L’Epée 1839. The watch features a flying tourbillon, jumping hours, trailing minutes, and a double-sided micro-rotor, all housed within a sharply angular case that looks less like a conventional timepiece than the faceplate of an anime mech. MB&F says the project was originally conceived for the brand’s 20th anniversary, but the complexity ballooned into something far larger—a full-scale mechanical object comprising nearly 1,500 components between the watch and robot combined.
The visual language will be familiar to anyone who has followed Büsser’s career. Since founding MB&F in 2005 after leaving Harry Winston, he has consistently rebuked the form of traditional watches to invent ones that resemble cars, fighter jets, frogs, bulldogs, and spaceships. MB&F watches often feel like physical manifestations of childhood imagination rendered in haute horlogerie. The Guardian leans directly into that idea: the brand openly references the sci-fi imagery of the 1970s and ’80s, while co-designer Max Maertens drew inspiration from Transformers and films like I, Robot.
