The opening of 1855 and the burden on the seat canton

Six schools, a school board and a director

The school that opened in October 1855 was organised in specialised divisions. The standard account lists five specialist schools, for architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemistry and forestry, together with a sixth division for mathematics, the natural sciences and general education in literature, political science and the arts.¹ The sixth division carried the compromise of 1854. Its chairs in the humanities and in political science were open to all students and to the public. They allowed the school to attract scholars of international rank whose presence gave the young institution a cultural standing well beyond that of a trade school. Contemporary sources and later histories both counted the number of students at the opening at a little under seventy. The German Wikipedia gives a figure of 68.²

The governance of the school was unusual. Supreme authority lay with the federal school board, whose first president was Johann Konrad Kern of Thurgau, with Escher as vice-president. The internal direction of teaching lay with a director chosen from the professoriate, the first being Deschwanden.³ Kern left Zurich in 1857 to become Swiss minister in Paris, where he served for more than two decades.⁴ His successor, the Thurgau politician Johann Karl Kappeler, held the presidency of the school board from 1857 to 1888. Kappeler shaped the Polytechnikum more than any other individual in its first half-century. He understood that engineering needed a broad theoretical basis, particularly in mathematics and physics, which is why he recruited prominent mathematicians from Germany to supply it.⁵

The school board was a remarkable construction in legal terms. Appointed by and responsible to the Federal Council, this federal authority took decisions on appointments, curricula and budgets that elsewhere in Europe would have been reserved to a ministry or to the academic senate. The professors had comparatively little formal power. This federal steering of an academic institution, with a small board that included politicians and businessmen, has survived in modified form in today's ETH Board, which since the federal law of 1991 has overseen both federal institutes of technology and four research institutes.⁶ The practitioner will recognise a familiar Swiss pattern here: a lean supervisory body with members drawn from politics and business, operating at a distance from the ministry and trusted to exercise judgement. The same pattern would later appear in the bank council of the Swiss National Bank and in the supervisory boards of the cantonal banks.

The seat in Zurich and the price of the seat

Why Zurich? The answer lies partly in politics and partly in resources. Zurich was the largest city of German-speaking Switzerland, the seat of the liberal university founded in 1833 and, through Escher, the canton with the strongest voice in the federal parliament during the early 1850s. Having lost the competition for the federal capital to Bern in 1848, the city could regard the polytechnic school as a measure of compensation. Above all, Zurich was prepared to pay. The seat canton accepted the obligation to supply and maintain the buildings, and until the separation agreements of the early twentieth century the canton remained the owner of the premises in which the federal school taught. The practical consequence was that the canton decided how the buildings were used and how their construction was financed.⁷ The city of Zurich contributed as well, particularly through the scientific collections that were assembled over the following decades and whose ownership, divided between city, canton and school, later proved difficult to disentangle.

For the first years the Polytechnikum lived in borrowed rooms. Teaching began in October 1855 in various locations across the city, including premises of the cantonal school and of the university.⁸ The arrangement was intended to be temporary, since the seat canton had undertaken to provide a building worthy of a federal institution. That building became Zurich's first monumental public building, a project that strained the finances of a canton whose annual budget was modest by later standards. The burden fell on Zurich's taxpayers at the very moment when the canton's leading men were also mobilising private capital for the Nordostbahn and the Kreditanstalt. It illustrates a principle that runs through the history of the Swiss financial centre: the cantons and cities competed for federal institutions and for private investment with their own money. Those that paid most obtained the institutions that later produced the greatest returns.

The obligations of the seat canton are a useful reminder that the location decisions of the nineteenth century were negotiated in financial terms. Zurich purchased the seat of the Polytechnikum with a long-term commitment of public funds, in a transaction that had many features of a concession granted in exchange for an investment. The canton's willingness to take on that commitment reflected a judgement, made by Escher and his colleagues in the Zurich government, that the presence of a federal school of technology would strengthen the economic position of the city over decades. The judgement proved correct, although nobody in the 1850s could have measured its value.

Gottfried Semper and the main building (1858–1864)

The building that gave the Polytechnikum its visible identity was designed by the German architect Gottfried Semper, who had come to Zurich in 1855 as the first professor of architecture. Semper was a refugee of the Dresden uprising of 1849 and had lived in exile in Paris and London. His recruitment to Zurich was arranged through the composer Richard Wagner, himself a political exile in Zurich. In 1854 Wagner wrote that a member of the Zurich government named Sulzer had asked him to offer Semper the post and had promised that Semper would be the supreme authority in building matters for all of Switzerland. Semper's terms were exceptional: an annual salary of 4,000 francs plus substantial lecture fees, an appointment for life and the status of the best-paid professor of the school.⁹

The canton of Zurich announced an international architectural competition for the building in 1858.¹⁰ Semper sat on the jury of that competition but in the end received the commission himself, with the cantonal building inspector Johann Caspar Wolff appointed to control the budget. The costs became a matter of lasting controversy. The authorities had expected a building of about one million francs, whereas Semper's project was estimated at 1,740,000 francs, almost double. Because the cantonal government considered the original plans too ambitious, a compromise was negotiated before the cantonal parliament approved the enlarged budget by 170 votes to 2.¹¹ The final cost when the building was completed in 1864 was about 1.7 million francs.¹²

The sum deserves to be set in context. At a time when the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt had been founded in 1856 with a share capital that was large by Swiss standards (see Chapter D.II), a single public building costing 1.7 million francs represented a substantial commitment of the cantonal treasury. It was financed by a canton whose own budget was still dominated by the traditional expenditure on administration, churches and schools. The decision to build on this scale expressed confidence in the future of the institution and in the fiscal capacity of the canton. It also expressed the ambitions of a liberal elite that wanted to give the city a monumental landmark comparable to the Federal Palace then being built in Bern.

Semper conceived the building as a “spiritual federal house”, a technical and universal institution of higher learning that would stand for the young federal state in the realm of knowledge as the Federal Palace in Bern stood for it in the realm of politics.¹³ Its long neo-Renaissance façade, placed on the slope above the old town, dominated the view of Zurich from the lake and the river. The building housed the Polytechnikum and, in its south wing, the University of Zurich, which moved there in 1864 because its own quarters in a former Augustinian monastery had become too small.¹⁴ Sharing lecture halls and the great hall was a deliberate economy. The two institutions lived under one roof for half a century until the university received its own building by Karl Moser in 1914.¹⁵

Contemporaries understood the building as a statement about Zurich's place in the country. An illustrated chronicle of the city published in 1896 called the federal Polytechnikum the highest pride of Zurich.¹⁶ Between 1915 and 1925 the architect Gustav Gull enlarged and remodelled Semper's building, moved the main entrance and added the dome that faces the Rämistrasse today.¹⁷ Semper himself left Zurich in 1871 for Vienna, where he worked on the imperial forum and the museums of the Ringstrasse. His Zurich years also produced the observatory of the Polytechnikum and the town hall of Winterthur, which Semper regarded as his favourite among his Swiss works.¹⁸

For the financial centre the building has a symbolic meaning that goes beyond architecture. The Polytechnikum on the hill and the banks that settled in the following decades on the Bahnhofstrasse and around the Paradeplatz formed the two poles of the modern city. While one stood for knowledge and the other for capital, the short walk between them has been made by generations of graduates who took up posts in banks, insurers and the industrial companies that those banks financed.

Notes

1. Peter Fleer and Hans Werner Tobler, “Eidgenössische Technische Hochschulen (ETH)”, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), version of 27 November 2012, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/010419/. ↩
2. Wikipedia (German), “ETH Zürich”, section Geschichte, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Z%C3%BCrich. Cited for orientation. ↩
3. Daniela Zetti, “Was hat Alfred Escher zur Gründung der ETH beigetragen?”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 8 May 2019, https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/was-hat-alfred-escher-zur-gruendung-der-eth-beigetragen-ld.1459053, and J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, “Zurich Federal Polytechnic history”, MacTutor History of Mathematics, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/ETH_history/. ↩
4. Wikipedia (English), “Johann Konrad Kern”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Konrad_Kern, which states that Kern took up the post of Swiss minister in Paris in 1857 and resigned in 1882. ↩
5. ETH Zurich, Department of Mathematics, “Die ersten Jahrzehnte / The first decades”, https://math.ethz.ch/the-department/history/first-decades.html. ↩
6. Peter Fleer and Hans Werner Tobler, “Eidgenössische Technische Hochschulen (ETH)”, HLS, version of 27 November 2012, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/010419/. The four research institutes are the Paul Scherrer Institute, Empa, Eawag and WSL. ↩
7. Nicolas Jene, “Die Hochschulstadt”, unimagazin (magazine of the University of Zurich), no. 3/97, https://www.kommunikation.uzh.ch/static/unimagazin/archiv/3-97/hochschulstadt.html. ↩
8. ETHistory 1855–2005, epoch summary “1848–1855” and “1855–1904”, https://www.ethistory.ethz.ch/besichtigungen/epochen/ETH05_epochen.pdf. ↩
9. Ute Kröger, “Ein berühmter Unbekannter: Gottfried Semper in Zürich 1855–1871”, lecture to the ETH emeriti, 26 February 2018, https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/main/eth-zurich/ArbeitenLehrenundForschen/professuren/ihre-professur/Emeritenstamm/180226_Kr%C3%B6ger_Vortrag.pdf. ↩
10. “Das Eidgenössische Polytechnikum als geistiges Bundeshaus”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, excerpt from a collection on Zurich public architecture, https://www.nzz.ch/article7BEPZ-1.489454. ↩
11. ETH Zurich, “A temple to science”, ETH News, June 2014 (originally published in Globe 2/2014), https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2014/06/temple-to-science.html. ↩
12. Irène Troxler, “Wie Zürich zu seinem ersten Monumentalbau kam”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, https://www.nzz.ch/zuerich/wie-zuerich-zu-seinem-ersten-monumentalbau-kam-1.18365646. ↩
13. “Das Eidgenössische Polytechnikum als geistiges Bundeshaus”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, https://www.nzz.ch/article7BEPZ-1.489454. The article compares the building with Schinkel’s Bauakademie in Berlin (1832–1835) and Hübsch’s Polytechnikum in Karlsruhe (1833–1836). ↩
14. Wikipedia (German), “Universität Zürich”, section Geschichte, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universit%C3%A4t_Z%C3%BCrich. Cited for orientation. ↩
15. Nicolas Jene, “Die Hochschulstadt”, unimagazin no. 3/97, https://www.kommunikation.uzh.ch/static/unimagazin/archiv/3-97/hochschulstadt.html. The article records that by 1920 the domes of the two institutions had earned them the nickname “Krone von Zürich”. ↩
16. Irène Troxler, “Wie Zürich zu seinem ersten Monumentalbau kam”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, https://www.nzz.ch/zuerich/wie-zuerich-zu-seinem-ersten-monumentalbau-kam-1.18365646. ↩
17. Wikipedia (German), “ETH Zürich”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Z%C3%BCrich. Cited for orientation. ↩
18. Ute Kröger, “Ein berühmter Unbekannter: Gottfried Semper in Zürich 1855–1871”, lecture of 26 February 2018, https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/main/eth-zurich/ArbeitenLehrenundForschen/professuren/ihre-professur/Emeritenstamm/180226_Kr%C3%B6ger_Vortrag.pdf. Kröger also records that Semper received Swiss citizenship in 1861 through the good offices of Gottfried Keller, then Staatsschreiber of Zurich. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.