ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century many innovations and transformations changed building construction – its agents, practices and objects – while a number of aspects remained unchanged. Late nineteenth-century construction sites were thus places of an 'intense' simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. This chapter illustrates different cases of simultaneities of the non-simultaneous with the aim to provide more specific definitions of what was 'divergent' and non-simultaneous. It briefly evaluates the prospects of applying the concept of the simultaneity of non-simultaneity to (late nineteenth-century) construction sites. The chapter utilizes the example of the construction site of the Stadthaus Fraumunsteramt, an administrative building for the City of Zurich, which is a substantial but typical urban building of the end of the nineteenth century. The construction site is a highly complex cosmos. It is a system of labour, assigning different trades with different tasks, where this differentiation according to types of work is an integral characteristic of the system.
