The Laws of Foreign Buildings: Flat Roofs and Minarets - Michael ...

The Laws of Foreign 

Buildings: Flat Roofs 

and Minarets 

Michael Guggenheim 

Department of Anthropology, University of Zürich, Switzerland 

Social & Legal Studies 

000(00) 1–20 

ª The Author(s) 2010 

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DOI: 10.1177/0964663910376990 

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Abstract 

This paper looks at how building codes and zoning laws mediate the relationship 

between foreign building types and their uses. The article is based on insights from 

actor-network theory and analysing buildings as quasi-technologies, actor-network theory’s 

understanding of buildings. It draws on two case studies in Switzerland. The first 

looks at the introduction of flat roofs along with modern architecture in the 1920s that 

led to the introduction of building codes in Ascona. The second is contemporary: it looks 

at the disputes about the right of Muslims to add minarets to prayer spaces that eventually 

led to an initiative to ban minarets altogether. In each of the cases I show how the 

building code mediates the travelling element and the associated lifestyle of the implicated 

groups and leads to a new definition of what those building types are. The law 

emerges as an important mediator of building types because it constantly shifts building 

types as being defined as material or social. 

Keywords 

actor-network theory, architecture, building codes, buildings, materiality, mosque, 

objects, zoning 

When, on 29 November 2009, 57 per cent of the citizens of Switzerland voted for 

banning minarets, shockwaves went through the media throughout the world 

(Cumming-Bruce and Erlanger, 2009). Switzerland was portrayed as denigrating the 

religious rights of a minority. While the issue has been given a lot of attention from 

the viewpoint of religious freedom and the seeming dangers of direct democracy, the 

legal cum architectural issues behind the decision have hardly been discussed. This 

article uses the case of banning minarets to analyse in depth the relationship between 

the law and foreign building forms. 

I compare the case of minarets with a case that stood at the very beginning of Swiss 

building codes, namely the import of flat roofs and modern architecture in general. The 

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2 Social & Legal Studies 000(00) 

import of flat roofs is an illuminating comparison, because of some similarities but also 

differences. In both cases, a building part was resented by the local population and fought 

with building codes. In both cases, the building part was taken to embody a foreign lifestyle. 

But whereas in the case of flat roofs, it is a modern lifestyle that attempts to destroy 

the traditional order of Switzerland, in the case of the minaret it is a traditional order that 

probes the modern order of Switzerland. 

In both cases, the crucial legal problem is how the building parts relate to the social 

order. The two respective questions for the law are as follows. Is a minaret necessary for 

Muslims to perform their religion in a mosque or are they just religiously meaningless 

towers on buildings? Are flat roofs signs of modernity or of dangerous immigrants? The 

goal of my analysis is not so much to answer these questions from the viewpoint of 

minority rights, but to analyse the legal theories of architecture behind these issues. I use 

the two cases to elucidate how building codes struggle with what I call the quasitechnicality 

of buildings. 

Recent scholarship in socio-legal studies has increasingly focused on the relationship 

of space and the law and specifically on the city (Ben-Joseph, 2005; Blomley et al., 2001; 

Butler, 2009; Manderson, 2005; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2007). This research 

showed that the law also regulates the spatial distribution of social practices. An important 

part of this research looks at the use of building codes and zoning laws to negotiate 

space use by different groups (Frug, 2001: 153–64; Oh, 2005; Perin, 1977; Ranasinghe 

and Valverde, 2006; Ritzdorf, 1994; Valverde, 2005; VanderVelde, 1989). These studies 

focus on the effects of zoning on specific – usually disadvantaged – groups such as 

migrants, women, the elderly, or unwanted activities such as abortion clinics or porn 

movie theatres (Papayanis, 2000). They look at zoning as having indirect effects on those 

groups and activities by its use to achieve what cannot be regulated with more direct laws 

directed at humans, such as vagrancy laws. 1 Zoning is directed at regulating human 

groups by imposing a normative view of how to spatially order society. By doing so, 

zones and the buildings therein become replacements for human groups and lifestyles. 

In this article, I build on these studies and expand the argument by taking the underlying 

architectural problems more seriously. My argument is based on an understanding 

of buildings in the context of actor-network theory: buildings are not technologies that 

merely enforce certain uses; rather they are quasi-technologies, whose relationship to use 

is vague. As I show, legal regulations of buildings mediate the relationship between the 

law itself, the building form and their users. Thus the effects of regulating buildings are 

vague and do not directly translate into the intended effects on the implicated lifestyles 

and groups. 

To elucidate this problem I focus on the architectural theories implied in legal arguments. 

How are buildings as building types classified and given names and qualities? 

How are these qualities linked to groups of people and defined as foreign? I want to show 

that because building types are quasi-technologies, they result in difficult legal conflicts 

where buildings and uses are sometimes identified with each other and sometimes kept 

apart. Furthermore, I wish to show that those processes of identification or keeping apart 

are not stable across cases because the law lacks a consistent theory of buildings. The 

article starts by elucidating the relationship between foreign building types and the law. 

I then move on to the two case studies and finally, to a comparison between them. 

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Guggenheim 3 

Building types as quasi-technologies: Legal 

Theories of Architecture and Zoning 

How to find out whether a building type is ‘new’ or ‘foreign’ or rather ‘vernacular’, 

‘native’ and ‘local’? 2 How to determine whether such a foreign building type is necessary 

for a given practice or not? Is a minaret necessary for Muslims to perform their religion 

in a mosque or are they just religiously meaningless towers on buildings? Any legal 

discussion of such a question requires a theory of architecture. The difficulty of identifying 

‘foreign’ building types hinges on the fact that buildings themselves usually do not 

travel. What travels are ideas and representations of buildings according to which buildings 

are designed. From this follows that, other than for humans or goods, there is no 

migration law and no customs to separate legal from illegal imports. A legal dispute 

about ‘foreign’ buildings has to resort to other kinds of laws. These are building codes 

and specifically zoning laws. 

Such a theory of architecture has to define how the qualification of foreignness relates 

to a building type and to a particular meaning or to the interactions of users. To do so, 

three categories have to be defined with regard to each other: meaning, use and materiality. 

Are buildings mere objects that can have any meaning and any use observers attribute? 

Or are buildings technologies that enforce certain uses and any change of a 

building results in different uses? 

A building type refers to a concept and a term that classifies a group of buildings 

according to their material form, its meaning and use. 3 For example, the building type 

bank identifies the word ‘bank’ with the material form of a building comprised of tellers’ 

windows, reflecting glass facades, offices and the use, mainly, of lending and borrowing 

money. The classification of a building as a bank performs the two operations of identifying 

the building with the use and with the appropriate material form at the same time. 

We assume that the material form, the tellers’ windows, the offices and the glass facades 

are needed to make the lending and borrowing possible. Users then have to interpret 

these forms correctly to be usable. If there were no glass facades, tellers’ windows and 

offices, users would not understand that the building is a bank and there would be no 

lending and borrowing. 

Following Francescato we can differentiate between form-type and use-type (Francescato, 

1994). I use the term form-type to designate typified building forms and usetype 

to designate typified uses. As I have illustrated above, in most of the cases these 

two coincide, because forms are identified with uses. Indeed, our perception of buildings 

and our orientation in a city routinely depends on this identification. But there are also 

instances where they do not coincide. This happens most notably in building conversion. 

Thus there are buildings whose form-type we might classify as a bank but which are used 

as a court of law. Depending on whether we call such a building a bank or a court, it 

either shows that a form-type bank does not enforce its use as a bank or that the usetype 

court does not depend on a typological material structure identified with a court. 

How do material, meaning and use work together in buildings? There are three positions 

on this issue: A first position understands buildings as technologies. Following 

Niklas Luhmann and Bruno Latour, I define technology as an assemblage of things and 

practices that produces with the same input the same output and thus makes processes 

3


predictable (Latour, 1991; Luhmann, 2000). To view buildings as technologies, as is 

often the case in architectural theory, means to believe that the material form of a building 

enables and enforces certain uses, more or less without assuming any specific interpretive 

qualifications of users. In this view, it is the buildings that define and enable both 

meaning and use. The notion of building types usually assumes such a view and architects 

often seek to turn buildings into technologies. Architects routinely would explain 

their design decisions for a bank with their intention to make a building that facilitates 

the practices that should take place in a bank. They would justify their placing of teller 

windows with the idea of facilitating the exchange between customers and clerks. Similarly, 

architectural critics would praise or criticize a building for facilitating such practices 

or failing to do so. 

A second, semiotic view would discredit the materiality of the building, but focus on 

the meaning of forms. But, like a technological view, it would hold that architects can 

insert meanings into buildings to achieve given effects. Seen from this viewpoint, a bank 

building does not so much enforce specific uses because of its materiality, but because 

users understand the meaning of the building as implied by the architect. Such a view 

largely became prominent in architectural theory in the late 1970s (see e.g. Jencks, 

1977; Jencks and Baird,1970). 

A third, sociological, pragmatic or user-centred view sees buildings merely as objects, 

not capable to enforce any meaning or use, but rather completely defined by the interpretations 

and uses of users and onlookers. A sociologist would point out, in the case 

of a bank, that it is mistaken to assume that the existence of a counter can influence 

or even be decisive for practices such as making payments taking part in it. They would 

argue that the building ‘does’ and ‘means’ nothing by itself, but is rather used in one way 

or another. 

These three theories of buildings are mutually exclusive. Actor-network theory and 

Bruno Latour specifically have shown a way out of such unfruitful exclusionary positions 

(Latour, 1991, 1992, 1993). According to Latour, the world consists of networks, 

comprised of social, symbolic and material items. Latour initially attempted to show how 

actors turn such networks into technologies and thereby make them predictable, by linking 

material, symbolic and social elements and thereby stabilizing and hardening the networks. 

Latour’s points of departure were scientific objects that originate in laboratories 

(Latour, 1987). He detailed how scientists turn such objects into what he called immutable 

mobiles (Latour, 1987: 226ff.). Immutable mobiles are hardened technologies, 

objects that are stable in varying circumstances and always perform the task assigned 

to them. For Latour such networks follow an additive logic: the more elements are linked 

to each other, and the better the elements are connected, the more stable a technology 

becomes. 

However, there is a crucial difference between buildings and such immutable mobiles 

as stabilized networks that emerge from laboratories. The latter can be controlled by 

scientists and their stability derives from users having only very limited possibilities 

to interfere with those inbuilt qualities. Buildings, however, are of quite a different quality. 

They lack defined and controllable interfaces. In fact, architects have, despite their 

theoretical and practical attempts to steer society with buildings, very limited possibilities 

to control users with buildings. 4 In most cases, despite the attempts of architects to 

4

Guggenheim 5 

do so, it is very difficult to say how the material and semiotic aspects of buildings relate 

to the interactions taking place inside of them. 

Sometimes buildings are indeed technologies that structure, enable or even enforce 

practices, and sometimes they are not. Because of this feature I call buildings quasitechnologies, 

thereby indicating that buildings in some instances work as technologies 

and in others do not (Guggenheim, 2009, 2010). Different from other technologies, it 

is very difficult to attribute technological powers or even failings to buildings. For example, 

it is easy to determine whether a CD-player works or not. However, it is very difficult 

to say whether a bank works or fails. 

From this theoretical premise follows an empirical imperative: We should not assume 

a sociological position and criticize actors for not understanding that buildings are not 

technologies. Neither should we assume a technological position and criticize actors for 

assuming that buildings are defined by interactions. Instead, I follow empirically how 

various actors define buildings as symbolic, technological or defined through interactions 

and explain why they do so. I use the following terms to describe the respective 

arguments of actors. When an actors tries to prove the technological properties of a 

building, I call this technologizing. An instance would be when somebody says, ‘Only 

with a teller window a bank works as a bank’. When an actor tries to prove the semiotic 

properties of a building I call this ‘mediatizing’. This would happen when an actor says, 

‘Mirror glass windows clearly indicate that this is a bank and this is sufficient to make it 

work’. When an actor tries to prove the interactional qualities of building I call this 

‘socializing’. An example for this would be when somebody says, ‘As long as people 

exchange money in this building, it is a bank’. Finally, I call ‘materializing’ a procedure 

that denies that a building is technical, and reduces it to its mere materiality. This is for 

example the case, when somebody might say: ‘This glass division wall is just a glass 

wall. It does not facilitate the exchange of money’. Each of these statements may be ‘proven’ 

with a range of material and interactional elements that are part of the respective 

processes. As follows from my theoretical position, none of these positions hold up to 

scrutiny, and none of them can be proven in any scientific or legal sense. 

The fact that buildings are quasi-technologies is central to understand legal conflicts 

about building codes and zoning. This is so, because the legal definition of a zone relates 

areas of land classified as a specific zone to a use taking place on this land and the buildings 

situated on it. Swiss federal law says: ‘zoning plans regulate the admissible uses of 

the land’ (Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft, 1979, Art. 14, emphasis added): The regulation 

is defined as concerning the uses, not the buildings. One could infer that the law 

does not hold a technological view of buildings! In theory, the definitions of specific 

zones in zoning law only relate to uses and not to building forms, because it is assumed 

that the forms do not enforce uses and therefore the latter are decisive for the classification 

of a building. However, as we will see over and over, this is only partially true. The 

confusion already starts at the level of written law when it defines specific zones: For 

example, the building code of the Canton of Zürich, in §60 reserves a zone for ‘public 

buildings’ – and not public uses (Baudirektion des Kantons Zürich, 2005, §60, p.15, 

emphasis added). The switch to a technological theory of buildings happens without 

being noticed, already on the level of the written law, and as I will show, it continues 

in jurisdiction. 

5


In legal conflicts about building codes and zoning law we see the consequences of the 

peculiar properties of buildings as quasi-technologies. This problem of quasi-technology 

as linked to zoning is central to understand why and how foreign types pose such intricate 

problems for both society in general and the law in particular. The following two 

case studies demonstrate these intricacies with examples where forms of buildings provide 

the starting point. This already shows that buildings are taken to be technologies or 

at least media, otherwise the conflicts would not occur at all. A controversy about minarets 

can only arise because somebody mediatizes a tower on a building as a form that 

necessitates in some people an urge to religious domination. 

The disputes discussed below show how the law in action produces foreign types 

by accepting them as the subject of disputes. I selected the case studies not for being 

representative of the universe of similar cases, but on the grounds that each of them 

reveals a different aspect of the problem: they both start with a different angle and 

both of them end with a different result. In each case I focus on how building types 

are contested. A contested building is either changed in its use or material form and 

then these changes become the subject of lawsuits. In each case, the use or the building 

is defined as being ‘foreign’. The courts have to decide whether the uses and 

changes conform to the existing legal classifications or not. By doing so, they also 

have to take decisions about whether a specific imported use or material form can 

be accommodated to existing laws. 

Flat Roofs and Local Identity: The New as the Foreign 

The first case study looks at the very introduction of building codes in Switzerland, the 

introduction of the first code in Ascona, Canton Ticino in the 1920s. 5 As I show, the 

introduction of building codes was a direct effect of trying to prevent a foreign building 

type, namely modern architecture and specifically flat roofs. The case study also highlights 

that the identification of what counts as indigenous and foreign is not so easy and, 

furthermore, that the foreign can become indigenous. 

Until the early 1920s, Ascona was a sleepy town of about 1000 inhabitants (Figure 1). 

In the late 1920s tourism, mostly from Germany, took off, which lead to a sudden 

increase in building activities, from around five applications for planning permission per 

year in the early 1920s to 53 in 1930 (Keller et al., 2001: 17). Most importantly, the German 

Baron Eduard von der Heydt became the owner of the famous Monte Verità where 

he commissioned in 1927 the German architect Emil Fahrenkamp to build a new hotel. 

At the same time the architect Carl Weidemeyer built the new theatre San Materno. Both 

buildings were part of the new modern spirit brought to Ascona by a commune of avantgarde 

artists, writers and dancers on Monte Verità, among them Hugo Ball, Isadora Duncan, 

Mary Wigman, Hermann Hesse, Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Henry Van de 

Velde, László Moholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers, Walter Gropius, and even Lenin. 

The new buildings sported big horizontal windows, flat roofs and exposed concrete 

walls. They could be built without having to comply with a building code, because such 

a law did not exist at that time. Soon, other buildings were planned in the same style. The 

town council of Ascona reacted by establishing a building commission with four members 

and it asked for pre-construction drawings and prescribed that new buildings are 

6

Guggenheim 7 

Figure 1. Photograph of the Piazza of Ascona around 1910, photographer unknown (from 

Keller, 2001: 13). 

built in a ‘Stil del Paese’ a version of a 19th century style from northern Italy (Keller 

et al., 2001, 18) (see Figure 2). 

When in 1928 the architect Eduard Keller from the German-speaking part of Switzerland 

applied for a building permission for his own little modernist vacation house, Casa 

Catterina, the building authorities of Ascona were alarmed. They asked the lawyer Otto 

Maraini to write an expertise about the new buildings. Maraini noted the ‘laudable intention’ 

that the ‘so called rational way of building’ tried to express the ‘purest and most 

pristine’ facets of buildings and he maintained that the new ways of building ‘logically 

implicate new aesthetic forms’ (Keller et al., 2001: 20, 22). However, he concluded that 

the buildings under review ‘do not respect the local character and its traditions’ (Keller 

et al., 2001: 22). He wrote: ‘It is Nordic import’, which, 

carries an expression, form and character that is not acceptable here and that stands beyond 

doubt in contrast to the spirit of article 1 §2 of the building code that states that the town 

administration has to maintain the style of the country with respect to aesthetics. (Keller 

et al., 2001: 22) 

He concluded that permitting more buildings of the same kind would lead to ‘an extraordinary 

damage for the harmony of the milieu and an irreparable adulteration of the scenery’ 

(Keller et al., 2001: 22). The town administration endorsed this statement and 

denied planning permission to the Casa Catterina (Figure 3). 

Keller himself employed the lawyer Marcionni, who answered that ‘in each field new 

ideas grow’. He tried to save the Casa Catterina by maintaining that ‘the rational architecture 

conforms better to our time ... [T]hus the rational architecture has to be our 

7


Figure 2. New buildings in Lombard style in Ascona and Locarno, photographer, Eduard Keller 

(from Keller, 2001:18). 

Figure 3. Casa Catterina. Drawing by the architect Eduard Keller (from Keller, 2001:16). 

architecture’ (Keller et al., 2001: 23). In his own account of the story, Keller noted that 

ironically ‘big windows and facades without ornaments’, which earned the designation 

‘Nordic import’ from Maraini, were seen as ‘southern style in northern Switzerland and 

8

Guggenheim 9 

Germany’ (Keller et al., 2001: 22). Indeed, the architect Paul Bonatz denounced the German 

Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, one of the most famous projects of modernist 

architecture, as ‘suburbia of Jerusalem’ (Hammerbacher and Keuerleber, 2002: 16) and 

a postcard showed the Weissenhofsiedlung as an ‘Arab village’ with Bedouins on camels 

as inhabitants (Hammerbacher and Keuerleber, 2002: 12). 

Two years later the situation seemed to worsen. Herman Metz obtained permission to 

build his new villa ‘Rocca Vispa’, designed by the architect Carl Weidemeyer, who had 

already built the modernist theatre San Materno. Construction had begun and the shell 

was already finished when the building authorities received complaints about the architecture 

from the local population. The authorities issued a decree to stop construction, 

but failed to inform the building owners. Only when they sent police officers on site did 

construction came to halt. After the lawyer Marcionni called the federal court on behalf 

of Metz they were allowed to go on with construction work. Again Maraini was asked to 

provide an expertise and this time he maintained that the building did not disturb the 

landscape and that he could not understand the behaviour of the authorities. Maraini now 

distinguished between good and bad modern buildings and found the Villa Rocca Vispa 

to be a good exemplar (Keller et al., 2001: 25). With this decision, modern buildings with 

flat roofs were established as legitimate exemplars of Ticinese architecture. 

Eduard Keller, in his account of the story, tried to interpret the case as an encounter 

between an enlightened professional architect, who derives his knowledge from modernist 

ideas, and natives steeped in tradition. Referring to the size of windows he noted that 

the traditional house in Ticino had small windows to which the ‘natives’, who ‘lack the 

need to unite with nature’, ‘stick with dogged energy’, since they prefer to sit in ‘dim 

half-light’ (Keller et al., 2001: 34). However, the ‘foreigner (among whom the Swiss 

from the German speaking part has to be counted) . . . wants to see the beautiful landscape 

even in bad weather’ (Keller et al., 2001: 34) (see Figures 4 and 5). 

Keller also noted that the traditional houses had granite roofs, or more recently tiled 

roofs, and he deplored the tendency to add attic conversions – and the failure of the 

authorities to prevent them. In contrast, he praised the flat roof for providing either a terrace 

or being of lighter construction. To build flat roofs, Keller maintains, it needs an 

‘expert and a significant budget’ (Keller et al., 2001: 38). With this, he not only meant 

to argue for modern buildings, but to redefine the idea of mutilation and divert it away 

from specific forms to the bad practice of lay people in general. Keller complained: 

‘Every mason, apprentice and layman can call himself architect and what results from 

this is well known’. The practice of modern architecture should thus include the ‘education 

of the people’ (Keller et al., 2001: 27). The resistance against the new architecture 

for Keller was ignorance: ‘Before people try to understand the new, they fight it’ because 

it is an ‘ ... uncommon picture, that [they] cannot process in [their] brains’ (Keller et al., 

2001: 19–20). 

The fight between Keller and the other modernists against the authorities of Ascona 

provides an example of the central problem of all legal attempts to protect the cityscape. 

If such laws should protect the existing, they have to define it in a formal language and 

they have to create stable networks between building parts, meanings and uses. The 

study of Ascona shows how both parties struggle to discursively create such stable networks 

and constantly fail. Two problems intersect. First, the place and time of the 

9


Figure 4. ‘Concentration point of the foreigners’. Photographer unknown (from Keller, 

2001: 32). 

Figure 5. ‘Concentration point of the locals’. Photographer unknown (from Keller, 2001: 32). 

buildings do not conform. Each new building is always local and existing in the present. 

To link it with other times (traditional, ancient, modern) and other places (foreign) can 

only be a discursive operation. Second, the qualification with other times or places has to 

link to specific building parts, and thereby attribute parts with technological qualities. 

When the building code is established it calls for a ‘Stil del Paese’, thereby mediatizing 

the building. It relates to a vague place ‘Paese’ and vague forms, since it calls for a 

‘style’ rather than defined parts. Ironically, the local and existing style is already an 

import. The Stil del Paese is a rendition of the architecture of northern Italy, since the 

10

Guggenheim 11 

‘traditional style’ of the Ticino – that is the style that preceded the Stil del Paese – is a 

style that requires traditional materials (mostly stone) and handiwork, making it badly 

suited for a rapidly growing town. Nonetheless, the Stil del Paese is framed as indigenous, 

literally meaning the style of the countryside, the village, and the place at once. 

Against this backdrop, the local authorities label the new as a whole as a foreign ‘Nordic 

Import’, without any qualification of which part is responsible for the qualification 

and what precisely constitutes the local, but rather using vague terms such as ‘character’ 

and ‘milieu’. The distinction between the local and the import rests on seemingly obvious 

assumptions of the wholeness of the local and the foreign. 

The promoters of modernism try to frame another relation between time and place. By 

pointing out that the modern style in Germany is thought to come from the south, Keller 

breaks the link between the modern and place. For him ‘our architecture’ is the architecture 

that stems from the present, a specific time rather than a place. Modernism has no 

place; it is international. 6 Rather than deriving desired forms from the past of the same 

location, the moderns derive them from the same period, but other places. The period is 

one of modern man, who connects to nature, wherever he or she is. Ironically, this portrayal 

is contrary to the semantic repertoire that links the indigenous with nature and the 

modern with culture. Keller manages to link two building parts with this opposition 

between the placeless modern and the traditional local: he portrays the natives as not 

interested in their landscape whereas modern man has an urge to connect to the beautiful 

landscape by creating big windows. The size of windows defines modern lifestyle, 

because the windows are the technology to connect to nature. They are not examples 

of a style, but a technology to connect to nature. 

The second building part, the flat roof, is the issue on which Maraini and Keller converge. 

A flat roof is materialized, since it is not the flat roof anymore as such that is 

linked to a given lifestyle, but the quality of its execution. It turns out that flat roofs 

become proofs of the acceptability of modern architecture, not because they are uniquely 

linked to modern buildings, but because they are particularly difficult to build. 

Maraini and Keller both create a distinction between good and bad architecture and a 

shift towards a relational understanding of fit. What is now excluded and legally banned 

is bad architecture, and architecture that disturbs the existing townscape, a notion that 

does not relate to a specific building part anymore, but to the quality of an architect’s 

design or the execution of building work. Flat roofs for Keller were not preferable 

because they were modern, but because they had preferable structural qualities, provided 

they were expertly crafted. The education of the lay people allowed killing two birds 

with one stone. First, it allowed attributing the rejection of the modern style to a lack 

of education, rather than a problem of the local versus the foreign. Second it allowed 

materializing the problem of the flat roof as one of building quality rather than of specific 

building parts. What led to the bad image of modern architecture was not so much a technology, 

but the structural failures of modern buildings created by bad builders. 

At the end of the dispute stood a shift: initially, buildings were understood as stylistic 

and thus symbolic units related to either time or place (contemporary ¼ modern ¼ international/foreign 

vs traditional ¼ local ¼ old). This definition occurred either by very 

broad terms or narrowly through the linking of building parts such as windows and roofs 

with these styles. In an intermediate step, windows were technologized as providing 

11


modern men views to nature. At the end of the process, the identification of buildings and 

building parts with styles was removed. Any building became legally acceptable, if only 

it was of a certain quality and if it did not disturb the existing townscape. The legal 

acceptance of a building could no more be defined by pointing at a given building part. 

The proof of whether a building would conform to the existing regulations became more 

material, but not technical, in the sense that the focus was moved away from defined stylistic 

aspects to those of relational fit and craft. The legality of buildings was completely 

uncoupled from lifestyles. It only mattered whether it fitted with its surroundings, whatever 

these were, creating a localized rule for the majority of buildings. 

Since each new building changes the existing town, the criteria of what constitutes 

‘the existing’ constantly change. What is local becomes a relational term, not related 

to a given place, but to the existing and ever changing stock of buildings. Thus the law 

comes full circle, and the foreign and the new can become the old and the indigenous: 

During the 20th century all Swiss towns developed similar laws protecting the townscape. 

In 1975 the Canton Zürich renewed its planning law, which included §238 that 

asked for a ‘pleasing overall effect’ of a building with respect to its environment (Kanton 

Zürich, 1975). In 1988, the Swiss Federal Court had to decide on a case in the Canton of 

Zürich where building owners wanted to add a saddleback roof to their flat roofed building 

that was built in the 1960s (Schweizerisches Bundesgericht, 1988). The federal court 

backed the appeal court of the Canton to deny the addition of a saddleback roof. The federal 

court argued that the saddleback roof would not fit in with the neighbourhood that 

consisted mostly of other flat-roofed buildings. Thus the flat roof had become indigenous, 

and the saddleback roof had become the import. The court did not mention where 

the saddleback roof came from. 

Also in the 1970s, (post-)modern architecture from the Ticino by architects such as 

Luigi Snozzi, Livio Vacchini, Aurelio Galfetti and Mario Botta started its run to fame 

in the international architectural scene. Their specific architecture was then labelled 

‘New Ticinese Architecture’, or ‘Tendencies’, which turned a specific kind of modernism 

into something local and indigenous (Steinmann, 1975). While the first three mostly 

built in the Ticino and localized modernism, Mario Botta became an international star 

and exported his trademark brick buildings to places such as Milano, Seoul, Tel Aviv, 

San Francisco, Berlin and Shibuya-ku, bringing a supposedly local variant of something 

supposedly international into a globalized marketplace for new forms. 

Types and Building Parts: Minarets and Mosques 

As noted above, uses guide the legal definition of zones. Zones are defined based on usetypes. 

But building permits related to zones refer to specific building forms. The law 

often has to identify changes of buildings as relating to specific uses and then decide 

whether such changes comply with zoning law. The conversion of factories into mosques 

in many Western countries poses exactly such a problem. The migration of Muslims to 

Western Europe has left them without buildings for the practice of their religion. 7 A mosque 

in Europe is often less a building form than simply a place where Muslims gather to 

pray. Gradually, the building is converted into ‘a mosque’ by indicating the direction of 

Mecca with carpets or by hanging notes of prayer times on the walls. For the law, the 

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Guggenheim 13 

question arises: When is a building a mosque? When it looks like a mosque, when it is 

built as a mosque or when it is used to pray? 

In Switzerland, the case of the community of Wangen was at the heart of a nationwide 

public controversy, when in 2005 the local Muslim community applied for a building 

permit to add a minaret to a factory building that it used as a cultural centre and prayer 

space. 8 At the time only two mosques with minarets existed in Switzerland, one in 

Zürich, erected in 1963, and one in Geneva, erected in 1978. Neither of them incited 

a major controversy when they were built (ami, 2006). Since the 1980s, increasing 

migration from Turkey, Bosnia, Albania and other countries resulted in some 150 backyard 

mosques similar to the one in Wangen (Allenbach and Sökefeld, 2010). As in many 

other Western countries, the public discourse after 9/11 shifted from identifying them as 

Turks or Bosniaks to identifying them as Muslims and treated them with suspicion. The 

rise of the right-wing party SVP under the leadership of the entrepreneur Christoph 

Blocher, which currently has nationally 29 per cent of all votes, also led to the raising 

of increasingly anti-Muslim voices (Skenderovic, 2009). 

In Wangen, the application for a building permit for the minaret was met with opposition. 

In a meeting of the local town council, Roland Kissling, the vice-president of the 

local SVP, argued, ‘a minaret is a mosque-tower. Thus with the minaret, the building ... 

is turned into a mosque. And a mosque is something different than the existing building 

which is a cultural centre with a prayer space in the basement’ (Wildi, 2005: 9). He further 

explained that the minaret is a ‘dominant testimonial’ that ‘constantly tells something 

that the neighbours do not want to hear’ (Wildi, 2005: 9). He went on to argue 

that the erection of the minaret would be the last straw that would turn the Swiss inhabitants 

against the Muslims and undermine all efforts at integration. 

The building authorities subsequently denied the building permit for the minaret 

arguing that the addition of a minaret constitutes a ‘relevant change of use’ (Bau- und 

Planungskommission Wangen bei Olten, 2006). According to the authorities the minaret 

is a ‘constitutive part of a mosque’ turning the building into a ‘sacred building’ (Bau- und 

Planungskommission Wangen bei Olten, 2006). They explained that the Christian 

churches in the town are in ‘zones for public buildings’ and the minaret, which is in a zone 

for commercial buildings, could not be allowed. The Muslim community argued that the 

minaret is just a ‘symbolic minaret’ ‘like a small chimney’ that they do not use to call for 

prayers (Bleicher, 2006). The Muslim community appealed to the Canton, which allowed 

the minaret (Figure 6). It argued that the municipality already allowed the conversion of 

the factory building into a prayer space and – echoing the Muslim community – called the 

minaret an ‘exterior symbol’ of this transformation (Staatskanzlei des Kanton Solothurn, 

2006). The Canton saw proof of these merely symbolic qualities in the fact that the minaret 

could not be used for prayer calls either by unamplified human voice or loudspeaker. 

After the further courts confirmed this judgement, a committee composed of rightwing 

politicians started a nationwide initiative. The initiative would add the sentence 

‘the building of minarets is prohibited’ to Article 72 of the Swiss constitution that deals 

with religious freedom (Gegen den Bau von Minaretten, 2008). The logo of the committee’s 

webpage shows a minaret that cuts like a spear through a Swiss flag in the shape of 

Switzerland. It also shows a sequence of pictures, the first depicting the building in 

Wangen, the second a group of dark minarets against a glowing sky, and the third a group 

13


Figure 6. The mosque of Wangen with the new Minaret, added in January 2009. (Copyright: public 

domain, taken from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moschee_Wangen_bei_Olten.jpg) 

of veiled women seen from behind. The authors of the initiative write in the accompanying 

text, ‘we have to stop the spread of Islam. A ban of minarets is necessary’. But they 

also add: ‘The minaret as a building has no religious character. It is not mentioned in the 

Koran or in other holy scriptures of Islam’ (Gegen den Bau von Minaretten, 2008). Thus, 

the ban of minarets would not contradict the freedom of religion in Switzerland. 9 Rather, 

they argue, that the minaret is a sign of a ‘religious-political claim to power’, using religious 

freedom to fight the equality of citizens and thus contradicting the equality of 

humankind granted by the law. On 8 July 2008 the initiative was submitted with 

114,895 signatures to the federal office. On 29 November 2009 the initiative was 

accepted with 57 per cent of the votes. 

The case shows the difficulty of defining and identifying a building type. Throughout 

the conflict a constant shift between use-type and form-type is at play and also changes in 

identifying these types by reference to different parts of a building.[B1] Roland Kissling 

and the town authorities first assume that the use of the factory building as a prayer space 

does not constitute a change of use, since they explicitly allowed it, when they allowed 

the use of the factory building to be used as a cultural centre. So far their argument is 

strictly technological. Mere use is no change, only if it is linked to a material change. 

Only the addition of a minaret turns a factory used as a cultural centre with a prayer space 

into a mosque, thus changing the building type. 

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Guggenheim 15 

For the Muslim community and also for the Cantonal court, the building type is 

defined by its use. The factory building is already a mosque even before a minaret is 

added. Their position is strictly socializing the building. The minaret itself is only ‘symbolic’ 

because it cannot be used to call for prayer. The minaret does not define the building 

type hence they materialize it. In a second step, the campaign to ban minarets follows 

this materializing move, by acknowledging that the minaret is only symbolic and does 

not define the building type, which is exactly the reason why the initiative supposedly 

does not violate religious freedom. For the committee, the minaret has been represented 

as a political symbol for the anti-democratic tendencies of Islam, and is not necessary for 

the exercise of Islamic religion. The initiative, if passed, would not stop the building of 

mosques defined as prayer spaces without minarets. It would prove that minarets are not 

technological requirements for the religious use of the building. But then the webpage 

also states that the spread of Islam should be stopped with the help of the initiative. This 

implicitly assumes that if mosques did not have minarets they would be less useful in 

spreading the message of Islam. Thereby they mediatize the minaret, not with reference 

to religion, but to politics. 

If we ask whether the law prohibits the immigration of building types, an irritating 

answer emerges: the initiative has been passed, but Switzerland will most likely not prevent 

the immigration of the mosque as a building type, if it is defined as a use-type. 

Rather, a new form of mosque without minarets will emerge and become stabilized. The 

banning of minarets might probably also trigger new legal battles about which building 

forms count as minarets, since they are not defined in the initiative. Immediately after the 

initiative was accepted, several ‘minarets’ were built, for example on balconies or in gardens, 

to provoke this question. Some graphic designers even marketed a sheet of construction 

paper to ‘build your own minaret’ – ‘without building permit’ (Dirtyhands, 

2009). If a church were to be turned into a mosque – which has never happened so far 

in Switzerland – the question could arise whether the church tower is now a minaret and 

would have to be taken down. As the debate about the ‘symbolic’ minaret in Wangen 

shows, a ‘chimney’ can be a symbolic minaret, even if it is not used as minaret. 

Conclusion: A Comparison 

The two cases present a complex picture of how the law relates to ‘foreign’ forms. As a 

summary, I compare the cases with respect to the different architectural theories 

employed in the controversies by the opponents and proponents of foreign building 

types. As it turns out, the question of what makes a building foreign and how it connects 

to foreign lifestyles has been answered quite differently, and even in opposite ways, in 

both of the two cases. In both cases, it is fundamental that the architectural theories that 

shall prove whether a building is foreign or not are never spelled out, let alone explicitly 

discussed. Instead, proponents and opponents alike adhere to the theory that fits their 

case, and even endorse other theories depending on their needs. 

In the case of modern architecture, the development starts with the opponents, in this 

case the local authorities, which imply a mediatization of modern architecture. For them, 

the dispute revolves around how styles relate to the local. The importers of modern architecture 

answer with a technological theory. For them, it is not about the link of styles to 

15


place, but to time. This also implies that outdated forms of buildings are not technological 

enough. The windows are big, not for stylistic reasons, they imply, but for technological 

ones: they allow seeing the landscape. The result is a relational building code that 

allows good buildings of any style, as long as they conform to the surroundings. ‘Foreignness’ 

is relationally redefined as not fitting the environment. If a ‘foreign’ building 

type becomes a majority in a given location, as happened with the flat roofs, the foreign 

becomes the local. 

In the case of minarets theories map in opposite ways: opponents start with a technological 

theory by assuming that it is the minaret that turns a building into a mosque, 

rather than mere use as mosque. The proponents, however, react with a materializing 

move, claiming that buildings are mere tubes on roofs, and that they do not change the 

already allowed use as mosque. For them, even though they are adamant that their building 

needs a minaret – this is why they ask for a building permit in the first place – minarets 

are additions to buildings for mere decorative and stylistic reasons and not related 

to promoting Islam as a religion or culture. The acceptance of the initiative results in a 

ban, which gives credence to the technological theory. Unlike in the example of modern 

architecture, the foreignness of the building type becomes not relational but stays absolute. 

A debate about what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘fitting’ minaret is not possible with the 

outcome so far. 

What I have shown with these two examples is that rather than just taking fights about 

building codes and zoning issues as proofs for how municipalities try to ban disliked 

practices from their land, these can be analyzed as instances of how legal discourse struggles 

with the quasi-technicality of buildings. Seen from this viewpoint it becomes apparent 

that the underlying architectural theories are neither stable nor reflected in legal 

disputes. 

It is the specific qualities of buildings as quasi-technologies that allow this permanent 

shifting. But it is the inbuilt proceduralism of the law, and more specifically the relational 

definition of buildings in building codes as neither proper technologies, nor 

defined by uses or meaning that makes these shifts possible. The cases help us to get 

a more nuanced view of how the law relates to buildings. As I have shown, building 

codes neither regulate just objects, nor do they directly discriminate against groups. 

Rather, building codes mediate between buildings and social groups by shifting between 

different theories of architecture. 

Notes 

Many thanks to Monika Krause, Ola Söderström, Lynda Schneekloth, participants of a seminar at 

the CCA Montreal, and two anonymous reviewers. 

1. Not only critical scholars claim that these zoning verdicts are forms of indirect regulation. Proponents 

of such regulation explicitly endorse the indirect approach, see for example the call to 

use zoning against obesity (Mair et al., 2005) or the wearing of firearms and alcohol consumption 

(Ashe et al., 2003). 

2. The focus on ‘foreign’ buildings leads to quite different insights compared to those of Mariana 

Valverde, who looks at how building codes and nuisance laws mediate ‘diversity’. In the case of 

diversity, no explicit distinction is drawn between native and foreign, but a relative distance 

between ‘normal’ and its aberration is under dispute (Valverde, 2008). 

16

Guggenheim 17 

3. In architectural theory, the term building type is ambiguous and controversial. Specifically 

there is disagreement on whether types only refer to forms or to uses, and if so, in which way. 

The discussion dates back to 19th-century French architectural theories by Quatremère de 

Quincy and J.N.L Durand. For an introduction to these discussions see Frank and Schneekloth 

(1994). 

4. See the vast sociological literature that champions the user, for example Kurtz (1971) or Ellis 

and Cuff (1989). 

5. My discussion follows the treatment of the case in a contemporary book about architecture in 

Ascona from 1934 (Keller et al., 2001) and the later historical interpretations by the architectural 

historian Bruno Maurer (2001). 

6. Consequentially, Johnson and Hitchcock renamed modernist architecture as ‘international 

style’ (Johnson and Hitchcock, 1932). Later, a debate about the ‘regionalist’ roots of this 

claimed placelessness of modernism arose (Canizaro, 2006). 

7. For a comparison with other countries, see the special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration 

Studies on Mosque conflicts (Cesari, 2005), for a comparison between the Netherlands and 

France, see Maussen (2009) and for Germany Beinhauer-Köhler and Leggewie (2009). For 

mosque building and Muslim spaces in general, a good starting point is the edited volume 

by Metcalf (1996). 

8. For details of the legal background see Jäger (2007). For further literature on the case see Baumann 

(2009a, 2009b). 

9. For a legal assessment of the initiative see Stüssi (2008). 

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