Each one of the watches released at Geneva Watch Days in this review exists because its maker identified a mechanical problem, or recognised a problem with someone else’s invention, and built a specific solution to it.
MING 57.05 Comet
The classic Louis Cottier worldtimers have always had one persistent flaw, daylight saving time (DST) does not change on the same calendar date everywhere. This one fact breaks the elegant simplicity of the 24-city bezel. Ming’s patent-pending fix splits the city ring itself into two. Cities that never observe DST sit fixed on an inner bezel, while those that do recognise BST are on a separate outer bezel. Twice a year, the wearer rotates a single click, exactly 15 degrees, advancing only that group by an hour without disturbing anything else.
The MING 57.05 Comet on the wrist and after dark. Its patent-pending split city ring separates locations that observe daylight saving time from those that do not, with a red indicator confirming when DST mode is engaged.
A small aperture flips from silver to red to confirm the watch is in DST mode. Ming marked its ninth anniversary with this invention and with it, a genuine departure from its traditional cases, with stepped art deco lugs and a small centre dial that consciously echoes 1940s Patek Philippe worldtimers. Limited to 200 pieces.
URWERK UR-150 Golden Scorpion
In this timepiece, Urwerk takes the opposite approach, finding a new way to observe time pass. Three satellite hour indicators travel around a flying carrousel while a retrograde minute hand sweeps a 240-degree arc, then snaps back to zero in one-hundredth of a second.
The URWERK UR-150 Golden Scorpion, shown in close-up, on the wrist and from the caseback, where its satellite hour display, sweeping retrograde minutes and twin turbines reveal just how much of the watch’s character comes from the mechanics beneath the surface.
A mechanical event you can practically feel and hear happening on your wrist. This edition, in 2N yellow gold with a sandblasted and satin-finished case, is part of the regular collection.
GREUBEL FORSEY GMT Balancier Convexe
Greubel Forsey has gone back to a complication it first tackled years ago and rebuilt it from the ground up. The new GMT Balancier Convexe replaces the brand’s earlier world-time models with a rotating three-dimensional globe, turning once every 24 hours, set beside the in-house variable-inertia balance wheel tilted at its signature 30-degree incline.
Seen from front, back and in macro detail, the Greubel Forsey GMT Balancier Convexe brings together a rotating three-dimensional globe and its 30-degree inclined balance wheel, making the mechanics of world time part of the show.
Rather than hide the regulator beneath the dial, Greubel Forsey again puts it on show: a black polished steel bridge on polished steel pillars. This allows to tell the time in a second city while admiring the mechanism doing the work.
MB&F M.A.D. 3 x Vincent Calabrese & Maison Alcée x NOSTROMO clock
MB&F’s contribution this year came in two parts, and both make the same point from different angles. The M.A.D.3 Vincent Calabrese, released through the M.A.D.Editions line, revives the AHCI co-founder’s 1980s Baladin concept, a bi-directional jumping hour paired with trailing minutes, reworked onto a La Joux-Perret base calibre. Flip it over and the visible rotor is cut away to reveal a line from Calabrese himself. At under CHF3000, it argues that real mechanical ambition need not arrive at six-figure prices, you just have to be lucky enough to win the raffle.
The M.A.D.3 Vincent Calabrese comes in two launch colours: blue for the public raffle and pink reserved for MB&F’s Tribe and Friends. Turn it over and the openworked rotor offers a glimpse of the movement beneath, along with a personal inscription chosen by Calabrese.
Max Busser has always been happy to spread the love to other independent artisans. With the NOSTROMO clock, he gave the young maison founded Alcée Montfort and husband Benoît Montfort the chance to jump into the limelight while keeping true to their original concept of letting the customer act as the watchmaker and assemble their own mechanical desk clocks.
This is the last timepiece to mark M.A.D. Gallery’s 15th anniversary, a desk clock modelled on the doomed ship from Alien designed by Max Maertens (creative designer at MB&F) and executed by Maison Alcée. The real point though is that it comes as a 222-component kit in a wooden box, with professional tools and an instruction book – Lego for horological fanatics.
The NOSTROMO clock, designed by Max Maertens and executed by Maison Alcée, turns the owner into the watchmaker: its 222 components arrive as a kit to be assembled over roughly ten hours, before the Alien-inspired machine finally comes to life.
The owner spends roughly ten hours building the movement themselves. Maison Alcée’s own governing idea is that luxury is better lived than simply bought, and Maertens’ design, all alien angles and a peacock-blue dial ring, gives that idea a strange and memorable place to land. It is, in its own way, the cleanest version of this group’s argument yet: a mechanism that can’t hide behind decoration, because the owner had to build the mechanism before there was anything to decorate.
What unites this group of watches is engineering honesty, even where the engineering itself isn’t new. Ming and Urwerk solved problems of their own devising; Greubel Forsey re-engineered its own signature complication rather than simply restyling it; MB&F, across a watch and a clock, let two outside specialists’ real inventions do the talking. None of these objects hide their mechanism behind a conventional dial, and none of them are decoration first, which is a meaningfully creative proposition today’s horological world.
Author: Andrew Hildreth
Other articles by I-M Inquisitive Minds about watches released at Geneva Watch Days 2026 s include Reinventing the House Icon and The Best Affordable Watches at GWD 2026.
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