News The Cité du Temps – a space dedicated to watchmaking – has now opened its doors, giving the Swatch Group a permanent showcase in Geneva.
The world’s largest watch group owed it to itself to be present in Geneva, the most prestigious watchmaking city on the planet. Now the job is done, not to say well done: following the inauguration of four stores on the rue du Rhône at the end of last year (Breguet, Blancpain, Jaquet Droz and Léon Hatot), the Swatch Group opened its Cité du Temps on 6 April. Ideally situated in the heart of the city centre, on the Pont de la Machine, this centre with a floor space of 1,000 m2 is a meeting place intended to host a wide range of exhibitions and other activities open to the general public.
Art is the central theme of the Cité du Temps which, on the second floor, houses the world’s only permanent exhibition of Swatch watches. Through several hundred models, the exhibition presents most creations representative of the company’s designers and artists, who from the date of its launch in 1983 to the present day have built the Swatch legend. Invited to "touch" time and its multiple facets, visitors also have the chance to design a watch themselves, which they can if they wish then enter in the "Swatch of the year" competition.
On the first floor, two exhibition and all-purpose event rooms will accommodate a range of artistic, industrial and cultural events. At present and until 10 May, they house a magnificent exhibition devoted to the old watches of Abraham-Louis Breguet, as well as a fascinating presentation of the company Nivarox-FAR, which produces key components for mechanical watches, namely escapements (escape wheel, complete pallet and roller) and oscillators (balance, balance-spring and their frequency regulation), for almost all of the industry’s big players. As the duration of this presentation was not known at the time of going to press, those interested in visiting Geneva to see it would be well advised to make enquiries beforehand.
Currently, the Cité du Temps is open to the public every day from 9am to 6pm. However, once the restaurant planned for the first floor and the ground floor lounge bar are up and running – in other words, probably in June, it will welcome visitors until midnight. Two final points of interest: a terrace will be installed in the summer on the open area adjacent to the Pont de la Machine, while the cost to the Swatch Group of converting the building, which dates from 1841, was around 8.5 million francs.
Cité du Temps, Pont de la Machine, 1204 Geneva, tel. 022 818 39 00, fax 022 818 39 10, contact@citedutemps.com, www.citedutemps.com.
April 24, 2006
