Until now Gottfried Semper (1803-1873) has been framed as an important theoretician but a merely historicist architect. With a few exception no scholar has so far analyzed the resonance between his writings and his built works. Rather than limit himself to a historical analysis of either, the author explores in this text the consequences of thinking architectural production as the convergence of writing and building in six of Semper's lesser known works, developed during his tenure in Zurich, Switzerland, between 1854 and 1871.