Credits: Article and images by Joshua Munchow @ Quill & Pad. See the original article here - https://quillandpad.com/2024/02/09/raul-pages-wins-the-inaugural-louis-vuitton-prize-for-independent-creatives-with-his-rp1-regulateur-a-detente-heres-why/
Congratulations to Raúl Pagès for winning the 2024 Louis Vuitton Prize for Independent Creatives with his RP1 Régulateur à Détente. The prize comes with a substantial grant of 150,000 euros and a 12-month mentorship with La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton.
Raúl Pagès is an independent Swiss watchmaker (movement designer and restorer). In 2005, he obtained his diploma of watchmaker-restorer in antique watchmaking with honors, then in 2006 his diploma of designer in watch complications at the CIFOM in Le Locle. Pagès is an accomplished musician, and a lover of art history and 20th-century design history.
In 2012, he set up his own business to manufacture the 352 components of his Tortue automaton entirely by hand. Building on this experience, in 2016 he designed and manufactured his first timepiece, Soberly Onyx, in a limited edition of 10 pieces.
In 2022, Pagès launched his RP1 Régulateur à Détente, one of the very rare wristwatches with a detent escapement.
In 2017, he became a member of the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants (AHCI).
Raul Pagès Régulateur à Détente RP1: Innovating Tradition
The evolutionary tree is filled with branches where life diverged and took different paths to fill various ecological niches. This is a simple way to understand the phylogenetic lineage of common ancestors and the shared traits that evolved before the species split from each other. One can trace the development of unique traits that are only found in limited groups of animals and traits that are found in nearly all living creatures.
Tracing also helps us to understand how some creatures branched off early on and have no closely related relative, staying almost exactly the same for millions or billions of years (or having all relatives go extinct).
Since life began almost 3.5 billion years ago, a majority of life in that time has been single-cell organisms. Only a billion years ago did multicellular life evolve, and since then the variety of living things has exploded.
But the tree of life has a bunch of evolutionary loners, species that are the only member of their branch, a great example being Homo sapiens, aka humans. The genus homo appeared just over two million years ago when it diverged from other members of the taxonomic family Hominidae (which today includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans).
There were a variety of homo species including Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Homo neanderthalensis, many of which existed at the same time.
Eventually, all the other species went extinct and Homo sapiens were the only ones left on our lonely branch of evolution. If it weren’t for the success of Homo sapiens one could wonder if a single-species branch is a sign of an evolutionary dead end, but that clearly is not the case.
The same can be said for horological inventions that have no close relatives such as the detent escapement. It sort of stands alone on its own mechanical evolutionary branch and has risked extinction, but it is still alive and well thanks in part to independent watchmaker Raúl Pagès who just released his new Régulateur à Détente RP1.
A clean and minimal design, the Régulateur à Détente RP1 introduces Pagès’ take on the detent escapement and shows that evolution is still possible.
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Credits: Article and images by Joshua Munchow @ Quill & Pad. See the original article here - https://quillandpad.com/2024/02/09/raul-pages-wins-the-inaugural-louis-vuitton-prize-for-independent-creatives-with-his-rp1-regulateur-a-detente-heres-why/