Frank Buchwald was born in Hannover, Germany in 1956. After studying design at the University of Arts in Berlin, he worked as a freelance artist and science fiction illustrator until 1993 when he turned his attention to designing and manufacturing furniture and other objects out of steel.

A decade ago, in his Berlin atelier, he started to focus on making his acclaimed Machine Lights series – imposing hand-crafted sculptural lighting objects featuring blackened steel, brushed brass and visible light filaments emitting a warm, yellow glow. Buchwald has created Nixie Machine using the same idiosyncratic style of design and engineering as the Machine Lights, but this time his starting point was spectacular Nixie tubes made in East Germany at the height of the Cold War.

He says: “I am fascinated by the uncompromising functionality of machines and their strictly form-follows-function design. I wanted Nixie Machine’s main structure – the four flared legs and three arms in the centre – to confidently carry the time, yet not distract the viewer from it. For me, the six Nixie tubes needed to take centre stage.”

The artist started, as he always does, by making a sketch of the structure on paper with pen and marker – Buchwald eschews modern computer design programs.

“I am passionate about sketching and drawing because they allow me to bring my visions to life, they help me find the essence of a new object,” he says. “If I don’t manage to make something of the ideas in my mind then I have a feeling of dissatisfaction. I’m a little bit obsessed like that, maybe a little crazy.”

A more detailed planning phase followed, before he set about constructing a prototype Nixie Machine that, from design through to completion, took almost a whole year. Once the prototype was perfected, Buchwald started work on the limited-edition production pieces.

Each Machine features no fewer than 350 components, each one painstakingly hand-crafted by Buchwald himself out of bars and blocks of raw metal.