There is a particular clarity to Geneva that resists indulgence. It is not London. It does not forgive improvisation, happenstance, luck in the same way. For Ken Mackay, this seemed to be important.
At a moment when digital photography was still finding its footing in architectural practice, when the language of the medium had not yet stabilised, he permitted a departure from the known. That trust was exacting. It came without instruction and without safety net. To be invited into that context, and to be trusted early, is something I have come to understand less as opportunity and more as finely calculated judgement. Mackay’s confidence was not expressed in grand gestures but in the simple act of allowing risk.
The decision to take early Phase One equipment out of central London and into Switzerland was not logistical, it was psychological. In London there was always recourse. Assistants, rental houses, familiar technicians, the accumulated knowledge of a city that absorbs error and redistributes it as experience. In Geneva there was none of that. This aligned, perhaps unexpectedly, with the architecture itself.
The project, developed with Helmut Jahn, is often described in terms of scale and integration, but what remains with me is something else. The ambition. A sense that the building was pushing against the limits of its own composure. The grid, the envelope, the systems, all operating with a kind of engineered intensity that bordered on excess.
Against this, Mackay’s interiors worked with restraint that was neither passive nor decorative. The palette was exacting. White leather held taut across planes that refused ornament. Oak deployed not as warmth in the sentimental sense but as kindness, a means of adjusting the human register against the scale of the building. Brass and chrome introduced not for display but for edge condition, for the moment where one material relinquishes control to another.
The camera had to understand the hierarchy embedded in the work. The relationship between surface and structure. The way in which thickness was concealed and then revealed through detail. The tension between the fixed grid of Murphy/Jahn and the interior’s attempt to humanise it without dissolving its authority.
There is also the matter of authorship. Mackay’s relationship with Jahn was not one of subordination but of negotiation. The architecture set the terms. The interiors adjusted the reading. Neither could fully resolve the project alone. That dynamic had to be made legible in the images. Not illustrated, but inferred.
Looking back, what remains is not the novelty of the equipment or even the scale of the project, but the alignment of trust, place, and method. Mackay’s early confidence was not misplaced. It was, in retrospect, a form of authorship in itself. Not over the image, but over the conditions in which the image could be made.
