The Contractor as More Than Builder: Conrad Zschokke SA’s Biographical Networks in shaping Switzerland built environment from 1909–1965

Through a bibliographical lens on Conrad Zschokke SA, a leading French-speaking Swiss construction firm founded in 1909 (today Impleania AG), this paper examines how contractors shape building culture for architecture and infrastructure, underscoring their often-overlooked role in architectural history. Despite their involvement in financing, coordinating contracts, and managing projects from planning to completion, histories of architecture rarely view contractors as more than builders. By providing capital, labor, materials, and ensuring regulatory compliance, contractors are integral to the political economy of the architecture industry. Their managerial role shapes industry standards and reveals the economic and political dimensions of architectural practice. This paper argues for expanding the biographical lens on the history of “modern architect” to include contractors as an essential professional actor.

Drawing on Conrad Zschokke SA’s understudied archives at HEPIA Geneva, the research employs a prosopographical methodology to uncover networks of influence. Informed by methods from the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this study shows how this family firm mobilized professional and institutional networks to shape Switzerland’s built environment at urban and territorial scales. This study traces the firm’s collective biography through its founder, directors, managers, engineers, experts, and its “unskilled laborers”, countering traditional single-author bibliographies that erase these trades by focusing almost exclusively on the designer and a narrow “architectural canon.”

Examining contractors acknowledges other stakeholders’ roles in the construction of the built environment, providing a revisionist history that integrates both designers and builders. This paper aims to deepen our understanding of the twentieth-century construction and inspire further research on overlooked actors in the collective biographies of architecture.