The True Round x Les Couleurs Le Corbusier collection by Rado reproduces, on ceramic dials, the texture of the concrete from three buildings by the Swiss architect, using colors from his palette.
Le Corbusier was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the watchmaking town of the Swiss Jura, and early in his career worked as a watch engraver. In 1931 he defined the Polychromie Architecturale, a colour palette for architecture whose shades, he held, could be combined in any order, and in 1959 he expanded it to 63. Today the licence for that palette is managed by Les Couleurs Suisse, a company operating under the control of the Fondation Le Corbusier.
Rado began working with Les Couleurs Suisse in 2019, when it introduced nine ceramic True Thinline watches, each in a single colour from the palette. Up to this collection, according to the brand, the collaboration numbered 12 watches. In February 2026 it introduced three more, the True Round x Les Couleurs Le Corbusier, each dedicated to one of the architect's buildings, and in October it showed them in Mexico City as part of its space at Design House.
Technical Specs
| References | R27049012 (Cité radieuse), R27048162 (Carpenter Center) and R27111162 (Chandigarh) |
| Case | Matte monobloc high-tech ceramic, with crown in the same material; 40.0 mm diameter, 47.3 mm long, 10.4 mm thick |
| Case and dial colours | Ivory white (4320B), iron grey (32010) or ivory black (4320E) |
| Dial | High-tech ceramic with a laser-engraved relief of each building's concrete surface |
| Hands | Three colours from the Polychromie Architecturale on each version; lacquered on the grey and black versions |
| Crystal and back | Curved sapphire with anti-reflective coating on both sides; titanium caseback with sapphire crystal printed with the palette's 63 colour stripes and the Le Corbusier logo |
| Water resistance | 5 bar (50 m) |
| Caliber | Rado R763, automatic; 25 jewels; Nivachron hairspring; adjusted in five positions; 80-hour power reserve |
| Bracelet | High-tech ceramic in the case colour; titanium folding clasp |
| Price | USD 2,800, MXN 57,500 and EUR 2,750, the same for all three versions |
Three buildings on the dial
Each dial reproduces, with laser engraving, the texture of the concrete of a Le Corbusier building, on a ceramic plate in the same colour as the case. The ivory white version is dedicated to the Cité radieuse in Marseille, a housing block completed in 1952; the engraving imitates raw concrete, which keeps the marks of the timber boards used as formwork, and the hands come in three shades of blue.
The iron grey version reproduces the concrete façade of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, completed in 1963 and Le Corbusier's only building in North America; its lacquered hands are cream white, orange and greyish green.
The ivory black version takes a detail from the façade of the Palace of Assembly, completed in 1962 in Chandigarh, the city Le Corbusier planned as the new capital of Punjab, in India; its lacquered hands are orange, emerald green and olive green.
In all, each watch uses four colours from the palette: that of the case, dial and bracelet, plus the three of the hands. On the back, the sapphire crystal is printed with the 63 colour stripes of the Polychromie Architecturale around the view of the calibre, and the presentation box repeats the stripes.
Colour inside the ceramic
n Rado's high-tech ceramic, colour is not a coating: it is mixed into the material before sintering, the process in which the parts are heated to 1,450 °C to harden them. That is why the tone does not wear off with use. The final colour is obtained during that firing, so matching a palette shade exactly takes many trials; Rado says perfecting the technique took years. Ceramic resists scratches far better than steel and, according to Rado, is light and quickly adapts to body temperature; on these three watches, both the case and the bracelet are ceramic.
The R763 calibre
All three watches use the R763, the three-hand automatic calibre Rado also fits in the Captain Cook Discover. It has a Nivachron hairspring, an alloy with low sensitivity to magnetic fields, and the brand adjusts it in five positions instead of the three required by the usual standards, so that it keeps more even time across the watch's different orientations. Its power reserve is 80 hours.
Prices and retail network in Mexico
Rado publishes the price in pesos for Mexico on its official website, VAT included, and it is the same for all three versions. Rado has a broad retail network in Mexico, with department stores such as El Palacio de Hierro and Liverpool and a large number of jewellers and watch shops, listed in the store locator on its website.
Architecture in a ceramic watch
According to Rado, the collaboration's earlier watches focused on the palette's colours. On the True Round, the dial adds the surface of three specific buildings, so each version refers to one of the architect's works as well as to his colours, and the ivory white version is the first on which Rado uses ceramic in that colour.
