Paris Office<span style="color:#000000"> </span>

A French employee made it possible for Burckhardt to move into a construction hut in a Paris suburb in autumn 1965. This new location had become necessary to let Burckhardt efficiently manage the construction of the headquarters and the planned laboratories for Sandoz AG in France, above all the administration building on Cardinal Richelieu’s former «Domaine Rueillois». In 1967, the «Bureau d’Études Burckhardt» opened in Rueil-Malmaison, a western suburb of Paris, as Burckhardt’s first official office in France, headed by architect Bernhard E. Zehrfuss. 

Barely two years later, with these premises also becoming too cramped, the office moved closer to the city center, to Rue Letellier in the 15th arrondissement. There, just a few minutes south of the Eiffel Tower, the location was much more promising from a business and transport perspective than the western suburbs. The young Burckhardt outpost worked on and completed projects both large and small, mostly in Paris, but later also in Lille, Orléans, Strasbourg, Toulouse and Lyon. The team led by Claude Bourgain and Willy Treu was also involved in planning commissions in Belgium and Basel. 

An exchange program made it possible for colleagues from Basel to spend time working in Paris, and vice versa. Besides local project management, the new location was primarily to support the major Swiss clients abroad and thus raise the company’s profile beyond the border. 

In 1972, the «Bureau d’Études Burckhardt» was renamed «Burckhardt France, Société civile professionnelle d’architecture» and was managed by Edgar Decurtins, Philippe Fayeton and Werner Stutz.