Zurich’s 130-Year-Old MFO Building Was Rolled 60 Metres to Escape Demolition

When Swiss Federal Railways planned to expand tracks at Zurich Oerlikon station in the early 2000s, a 130-year-old brick building stood directly in the path of two new platforms. Rather than tear it down, the city of Zurich chose to move it — an approach Switzerland has used for decades to preserve historic structures that would otherwise be demolished.

The building in question, known as the MFO building after the Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon that once had its headquarters there, was built in 1889 and stretches 80 metres. The company that occupied it eventually grew into engineering giants like ABB, and local residents and heritage groups fought to save the structure as one of the last physical reminders of the neighbourhood’s industrial past.

The city commissioned architecture firm Müller and Truniger to study whether relocating the building was feasible. Their study concluded it was both technically possible and economically reasonable to move the entire structure to a site just outside the railway perimeter, and the local government agreed to fund the project and provide land. The move went ahead in 2012, after years of planning.

Engineers first supported the building on temporary steel props while removing and replacing its original foundation walls with new concrete beams. Steel rails and rollers installed underneath allowed hydraulic presses to push the structure slowly along a fixed track — roughly 60 metres westward at just over a millimetre per second, a journey of 17 to 19 hours. The building settled into its new foundation accurate to within a few millimetres.

Switzerland has relocated several other historic buildings over the decades using this method, relying on specialist relocation firms — often family-run businesses in smaller towns — that have developed deep expertise in the field. With around 75,000 buildings across the country holding formal historic protection status, relocation is often viewed as more practical than redesigning an entire infrastructure project to avoid a single structure.