Will Davis - research

Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture
(First academic monograph, manuscript under preparation)

Nypa palm (nypa fruticans) is one of the most widespread palm species in Southeast Asia. It is classified as a weed due to its rapid growth in tropical estuarine habitats and is harvested for use as a building material, woven and thatched into panels and shingles. This book tells an unconventional story in three parts. The first considers nypa palm as a house-building material in tropical places, knowledge of how to weave its fronds into shingles and wall panels an intergenerational, unwritten, and gendered tradition. The second expands on this premise by exposing how nipa and other palms were also modern materials, crucial to the context of twentieth-century practices of insurgency, counterinsurgency, and Indigenous resistance. The third part weaves a course between traditional unwritten knowledge and a gendered material history of architecture in which nipa is stitched or woven into shingles by women. In this case, craft is both contemporary condition and historical truth.

Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture contends that the attributes that make nypa palm so appealing to the architectural senses—to a historiography of weaving practices, touch, and tradition; to an affinity for the “vernacular” as a visual metaphor for sustainability—are the same reasons it was weaponized in the displacements wrought by developmentalism through the second half of the twentieth century. This book highlights how palm is a historical subject and an archive. Its narrative thread follows female makers, folklorists, and botanists in the nineteenth-century, to counterinsurgency operatives and the Indigenous resistance movement against them in the Philippines and Vietnam during the Cold War. Palm Politics is a challenge to architectural historians to rethink how the warfare of agribusiness was shaped by gender, materiality, and touch in the tropical world.

The project began under the same title as my doctoral work at UCLA (2015—2021), and the resulting dissertation was awarded the Society of Architectural Historians David B. Brownlee Award in 2022 for outstanding doctoral dissertation research in architectural history.

Women weaving nipa palm shingles, Biliran, Visayas. Photograph by David Fairchild, 1940

Tribal Forum, September 1985

Nipa shingles, Bohol, 2023

Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Plantation Architectures
(In progress, SNSF Ambizione 2024—2028 Project)

From historical formation to contemporary moment, the plantation in tropical Southeast Asia is a symbolic example of resource extraction and asymmetric labor conditions. Architectural spaces mediated and scripted this formation in distinctive ways. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the rise of steam powered ocean-going liners marked a new era of resource extraction and trade in the Malay Archipelago. By the late-nineteenth century, tobacco drying barns and planters’ houses; packing facilities in entrepôt port cities; shops, teahouses, and advertising in colonial metropoles, were all fixtures in the architectural pantheon of a globalized plantation culture. Occupying a relatively minor role in this story were Swiss planters who, unlike those of other European nations, were not beholden to vast territorial possessions or the maintenance of a local militia to uphold them in the name of a “civilizing mission.” Eliding dominant nationalist tropes while negotiating “colonialism without colonies” (Purtschert et al. 2016), the Swiss model of plantation capitalism sat at the nexus of planters, their local indigenous counterparts, and an emerging internationalization of plantation culture architecture.

Plants were simultaneously crops, cargo, and building materials, giving them an unusual centrality to this process, and presenting an underexplored architectural archive.This research proposes to investigate the architectures of plantation culture, beginning with Swiss tobacco planting in Sumatra in the 1870s, following the routes of plant species as a methodological framework across geographies. The multi-sited project will be carried out in tropical Southeast Asia, Switzerland, and wider Europe, following the route that tobacco and other cash crops took, from the Malacca Straits, through the Suez Canal, and on into Europe. The historical scope of the project will accommodate nineteenth- and twentieth-century transformations in the architecture of the plantation and its role in environmental change as forerunners to twentieth-century monocrop agribusiness. More broadly, the project takes its cue from studies that engage multiple temporal and geographical frameworks as a creative way to manage histories of the Anthropocene and climate catastrophe. Architecture, as a material, scientific, and cultural practice, offers a distinctive lens through which to understand the history of plantation systems. Architecture’s material residue-timber, stone, plant materials, masonry, human labor-are intrinsically related to their geographical setting and form the empirical evidence for this project. Re-examining the colonial plantation through the tobacco plant as traveling subject reveals an entangled set of architectural case studies.

The project asks the following questions:

• How were plantation cultures and indigenous lifeways in the tropics entangled with architecture in the metropole, conceptually, stylistically, and intrinsically?
• Why was the self-conception and visual culture of Swiss planters and their architectures distinctive?
• As an ethnobotanical-centric architectural history, how did plantation labor and lifeways make their way back to, and become entangled with metropolitan life in European places?

You can follow updates about the project at voyagingvapors.com and the SNSF grant page here.

Villa Patumbah in Architektonische Rundschau, 1889

Villa Patumbah, 2022

Palm oil plantation, Johor State, Malaysia, 2022

Loneliness and Disappearance: a biography of Dorothy Pelzer
(Ongoing research)

In November 1969, amid finalizing drafts of her book Houses Are People, Dorothy Pelzer called her friend, the Malaysian architect Lim Chong Keat, from her home in the Cameron Highlands: “Chong Keat, can I come to see you…I’m desperately lonely. Do you have a recording of Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances I can listen to with you?”

Between 1962 and 1972, Pelzer catalogued the slow disappearance of traditional house forms in Southeast Asia, whether nipa palm fronds woven into wall panels in the Filipino bahay kubo, or the densely thatched roof of the ravi in Papua New Guinea. Pelzer’s project was meticulous and relentless. “Village forms, structure, use of materials, roof shapes, planning, privacy, decoration, prefabrication, expressive significance and various non-functional factors such as orientation and symbolism” all contributed to her sprawling project. Pelzer never finished Houses Are People—she died from cancer in April 1972—but perhaps she saw herself in the figure of Bela Bartok: an observer, a recorder, a translator of something that was disappearing. When Bartok lugged a phonograph around remote Romanian villages to record folk songs in 1918, it was because he asserted that peasants were “under the influence of urban culture [and had] given up their old customs and the corresponding ceremonies.”

This project will be a biography of Dorothy Pelzer, where the architect, having crossed myriad disciplinary and geographic borders, sheds light on the worlds of architecture, humanitarianism, archive making, and ethnographic research through their many mutations during the twentieth century. The research has so far involved a collaborative course at the National University of Singapore with curator of NUS Museum, Siddharta Perez, with students of the Department of Architecture in which we looked at Pelzer's archives held at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and made an exhibition about them at the museum's prep room (November 2023). I have also written a short article on Pelzer published at the online journal PLATFORM.

Houses Are People Exhibition
prep room, NUS Museum
November 24, 2023

Exhibition view, student John Chew introduces group project, Nov. 2023.

Carrying out oral histories interview about Dorothy Pelzer with Lim Chong Keat, June 2018.