Up to the 19th century the set of rules for building were deduced mainly empirically. Knowledge on construction was primarily gained through personal experience and remained at an implicit status. Thus innovation in building construction was mainly derived by the empirical procedures on site – to exaggerate: the construction site exclusively inherited the ‘experiment’ in the building sector. This bias changed at the latest in the 19th century: Institutional changes, as the foundation of the École polytechnique in the late 18th century and following up Polytechnic Schools in the German states; the redefinition of building knowledge as a scientific one in the modern sense; the upcoming of material testing as a discipline; and further developments resulted in a redefinition of experiments in the technical sector and especially in the building sector:

In the first place construction knowledge was no longer derived exclusively on the construction site, but was being “invented” on paper; gained through “experiments” in the laboratory; or taken from adjacent disciplines such as engineering. The enormous wealth of technical literature in the 19th century might be one illustration for this shift. As a result the construction site newly “acted” as a practical testing field: Novel construction techniques such as the famous ‘Holzcementdach’ were being tested “in real”; new materials such as industrial glazes for wood surfaces or glass bricks for translucent walls were used first. The construction site became a field of experiments in regards to application and implication. Nevertheless, in certain areas the original, empirical character still remained on the construction site, as building in the (late) 19th century was in a transitional state – as was the role of the experiment.

The proposed paper aims to describe the status of the construction site as a field for experiments. Looking at archival material of construction sites such as the daily records in conjunction with reports on experiments on construction sites in the journals of the time, the discussion of practical instances might serve as starting point to illustrate the shift. The sketch of broader, underlying developments will position the role of the construction site itself. The focus of the paper will be on construction sites of the prevalent buildings of the city in the 19th century, such as flats, schools or churches; these sites not only account for the dominant number, but they also display the ‘amplitude’ of different building techniques. A geographical limit of the research will be the region of Zurich, Switzerland, as the paper will also present first results of the author’s dissertation project.