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The green apple on Tadao Ando’s wrist
Why a Pritzker laureate designed a watch with no numbers
Outside the Children’s Book Forest in Osaka’s Nakanoshima district there is a green apple the size of a car.
Tadao Ando planned the library himself and gave it to the city he was born in. The sculpture in its porch is called Youth, after Samuel Ullman’s poem, which holds that youth is a temper of the will rather than a number of years. Ando has returned to the image repeatedly. His own summary of it: not the sweet ripe red apple, but the green apple, immature and sour yet filled with hope for tomorrow.
In 2023 he took it to Portugal.
Cauny, founded in 1946, asked him to design a watch. What came back was a lugless case with a domed crystal, no numerals, no seconds hand, and a single white leaf where the hour markers would be. Green is the apple. Grey is the concrete he built a career on. The first sketch, in green marker on a napkin, is in the brand’s archive.
It runs a Swiss parts quartz movement, sapphire crystal with inner anti-reflective coating, Italian leather strap, 37.5mm or 31.5mm.
Cauny is sponsoring the Design is Human Awards 2026.
