Engineers Moved a Thousands-Tonne Zurich Building at 1mm a Second to Save It

Moving a brick building that weighs thousands of tonnes sounds close to impossible, but Swiss engineers pulled it off in 2012 when they relocated Zurich’s historic MFO building 60 metres westward at just over a millimetre per second — a journey that stretched across roughly 17 to 19 hours.

The MFO building, the former administrative headquarters of the Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon in Zurich’s Oerlikon district, was built in 1889 and runs 80 metres long. The company that once occupied it eventually grew into engineering giants like ABB. When Swiss Federal Railways planned to expand tracks at Zurich Oerlikon station in the early 2000s, the building stood directly in the path of two new platforms and faced demolition.

After local residents and heritage groups objected, the city of Zurich commissioned architecture firm Müller and Truniger to study whether relocation was feasible. The study concluded that moving the structure to a site just outside the railway perimeter was technically achievable and economically reasonable, prompting the local government to fund the project and provide land for the new site.

To execute the move, engineers first supported the entire building on temporary steel props while removing its original foundation walls and replacing them with new concrete beams. Steel rails and rollers were installed underneath, letting hydraulic presses slowly push the structure along a fixed track until it settled into its new foundation accurate to within a few millimetres — a remarkable feat of precision for a building of that size and age.

The MFO relocation is part of a broader Swiss tradition: specialist relocation firms, often family-run businesses in smaller towns, have moved farmhouses, churches and other brick structures over the decades rather than see them demolished. With about 75,000 buildings across Switzerland holding formal historic protection status, relocation has become a practical engineering solution whenever a heritage structure stands in the way of new infrastructure.