Natural stone is a widely used building material and stylistic device for Swiss buildings. Until the expansion of the railway network at the end of the 19th century, most of the natural stones in Switzerland was extracted from local quarries, most of which are no longer active today. In order to be able to identify the exact origin of a building stone, information from existing archives is only partially sufficient. The composition of a type of rock is strongly dependent on the local geological conditions at the extraction site. In order to find information on the origin of natural stones or on substitute material, ideally from the same geological unit or even better from the original extraction site, however, Switzerland lacks a uniform, national natural stone inventory, as there are, for example, for several federal states in Germany.
Between 1899 and 2018, the Swiss Geotechnical Commission (SGTK) compiled numerous data on geological raw materials in Switzerland. These include several data sets on thousands of Swiss natural stone quarries active from Roman times to the present day, only some of which are currently published and publicly accessible. In 2018, our group took over this still unused dataset.
We are planning to to create a uniform online inventory for entire Switzerland and to make the approximately 17,000 data sets publicly accessible via the existing web portal map.georessourcen.ethz.ch. A next step will be to link these mining sites with the data on rock material characteristics (colour, weathering properties, cleavage, etc.) today published or stored at various locations.
For the optimal and user-friendly implementation and targeted expansion of this online inventory, we will work closely with experts in the fields of historic building research and conservation.