Moving construction: Zschokke and the orchestration of the labor force in the twentieth-century infrastructural landscape

The paper centers on Zschokke, one of the historically most significant Swiss construction contractors active from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century. Although deeply rooted in Switzerland, Zschokke also exerted international influence, particularly in French colonial and protectorate states. This study illustrates how a construction firm operates ubiquitously through transnational hierarchical decision-making processes, contracting methods, and credit-bearing financial responsibility to guarantee multi-scalar project delivery and profitability. These corporate bureaucratic mechanisms mark the transformation of the builder into an administrative entity—the contractor—dissolving the early twentieth-century divide between design and construction and institutionalizing bureaucratic capitalism in global building practices today.

Drawing on the analysis of Zschokke’s meticulously kept Mutations dans le personnel records (HEPIA archives, Geneva), which track employee relocations across multiple mid-twentieth century infrastructural projects, the paper shows that, alongside technical and design expertise, the firm’s labor-management bureaucracy shaped it into one of the most territorially impactful construction companies of Switzerland until today (today named Implenia after the merger). The circulating networks of skilled and unskilled personnel were indispensable to the construction firm’s continuous output and evolution of expertise through ongoing projects. By systematically transferring know-how from one project to the next and relocating workers as needed, Zschokke evolved from a local participant into a non-local actor driven by efficiency and profit.

Whereas architectural histories have relegated contractors and their bureaucratic apparatuses to the margins, this study argues for the centrality of “bureaucratic agencies” in shaping twentieth-century built environments. By dealing with bureaucracy as a material force—through contract management, workforce organization, and the navigation of building codes and regulations—this paper reframes the contractor as a co-author of twentieth-century architectural and territorial construction.