Swiss Coloniality and Its Industrial Architecture

In the field of architecture and urban history, we are yet to unravel the impact of Switzerland’s entanglements with global colonialism on the built environment, and, more widely, on the aesthetic, material and craft cultures of Swiss cities.

To unravel these often indirect entanglements, the term coloniality is a particularly salient term: it refers to the long-lasting processes and indirect effects that are the result of centuries of colonialism, and that mark a landscape of global inequality, even after the ‘official’ reign of colonialism has ended. So, despite being a country without colonies, what if we consider Switzerland’s architectural and urban history from the perspective of this historical inequality? What is the specific architectural and urban dimension of Swiss coloniality?

Each semester, our Research Studio is zooming in on one specific kind of infrastructure that acted as support for global colonialism – from the straightforward tangible infrastructure of trade routes, ships, outposts and plantations, to more subtle and intangible infrastructures such as mission work, science and other forms of knowledge production. The economic realm is by far the most obvious place to start this investigation, and the role of industry in particular – with its extraction of raw materials and production of goods to be traded on markets – offers a hands-on approach to unravel its entanglement with architecture and the built environment.

In our Autumn 2023 studio, students investigated this industrial infrastructure from architectural, urban typological, environmental and material perspectives. How did, for instance, the chocolate or textile industry shape the built environment of Switzerland through its factories and warehouses, its trade routes, or housing projects for its laborers? How did architecture itself become part of an industry that was exported abroad, through its building materials, its technology or its expertise? And how was a colonial-fed industry represented and symbolized in the Swiss cityscape?