An architect's view of Geneva

Lift09 speaker Dan Hill (video) wrote a blog post an essay following a walk in Geneva, touching on the story of the city through its architecture. A very nice way to rediscover the city I live in, and see it with fresh eyes.

Notes on Geneva. A Walk.

As noted previously, I managed to escape for a brisk walk around Geneva during the Lift09 conference, heading from the conference venue down towards the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO) and back. This was the first time I’d done such a drift aided by the iPhone’s GPS+Google-driven 'certainties', and it worked well, enabling me to embark in broadly the right direction, veering off aimlessly onto the most interesting-looking streets whilst reacquainting myself with the optimum route every now and then; a kind of waggle dance back and forth, following invisible satellites.

I was struck by how much I enjoyed Geneva. I’d never been, and despite being an ardent Helvetiaphile I had only middling expectations. One friend had described it as ‘the Canberra of Switzerland’, and so I was prepared for a peculiar, mannered version of said Australian capital, or The Hague, or Brussels, or Washington DC or one of those other cities that essentially exist purely for the sake of administrative clarity.

Yet there was immediately more to it than that. It is certainly skewed massively by the presence of the headquarters of just about every major international legislative organisation one could think of - the UN, the WTO, the Red Cross, and then a slew of organisations like ‘World x Organisation’, where ‘x’ is ‘Meteorological’ or somesuch. So while this manifests itself in an array of modernist-lite glass buildings of varying quality - as if a kind of playground for Play Time’s designers - it also lends the city with a distinctly global air and a massively diverse set of nationalities and cultures. 

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