Palm leaves loosely thatched create a bushy screen wall. The screen is part of a large building designed to shelter the pieces of other plants and make them dry out quickly. They are tobacco leaves, hanging from the rafters in neat rows swaying in the breeze. Nearby, the dried ones are being plucked and gathered into sorting bags, where they find themselves stacked by quick fingers into piles of like-colored leaves and pressed into baskets woven from the fronds of the pandanus plant. Finally, they are stowed into ships built with trees far from home, hulls of oak and elm, decks of pine. Altogether, they will float back towards Europe. Dry, sort, stack, press, stow, sell.
The plantation system is a term used to describe forms of monocrop agricultural land use, of shaping land after the cultivation of single crops in climates suitable to them. Scholarly discourse in recent years has traced the historical genealogies of extraction and de-diversification of the natural world that the system, with its rapacious claims to territory over four centuries, has come to represent. Because of their low seasonal variation and consistent sunlight, tropical zones—also some of the most biodiverse places in the world—have historically been sites where the most intense forms of plantation agriculture took place. In a broader sense, from at least the seventeenth century on, the plantation system fundamentally altered how people perceived land, property, plants, people, and their environments. Artificial species flows combined with trade and commerce created a disembodied system with disastrous consequences for the ecological complexity of the world and its climate.
The recognition of this system has led to contemporary shifts in perspectives of the environment, that it is interconnected and needs diversity in order to thrive, revealing the extent to which a reimagining of existence outside of plantation logics is necessary. Conceptually, therefore, to understand the history of the plantation is also a method to understand its opposite: biological complexity and inter-species flourishing.
Architecture has had a troubled historical relationship to plantation environments. As an ordering system, dwelling device, and apparatus for synthetic plant growth, one can project a range of examples. In Europe these range from the stately residences in the British countryside of erstwhile plantation owners in the Caribbean to greenhouses for testing banana plant hybrids to tobacco auction houses in Amsterdam. Geographically removed, yet deeply intertwined are the examples in Europe’s elsewheres: coffee processing warehouses under a tropical sun, watchtowers framing their perimeter, rudimentary barracks for workers; and as counterpart, examples of living outside of or in spite of the plantation system, such as maroon communities and so-called slave gardens.
What can plants tell us about these stories, and in what ways do plant histories diversify our understanding of the plantation system and its architectures?
This two-chapter symposium is interested in the entangled histories that the plantation system produced, and each location is chosen for its historical role in specific plantation stories. Singapore Botanic Gardens was founded in 1859 under the auspices of an Agri- Horticultural society for research and experimentation and played host to a series of botanists and plant explorers as a place to grow, experiment, and distribute potentially useful plants (among others, one early success was the cultivation and propagation of Hevea brasiliensis, Para Rubber). Chapter 1, “Plant Histories” takes place in two former colonial bungalows designed by architect Alfred J. Bidwell at the turn of the century that are now part of Singapore Botanic Gardens’ recent Gallop Extension. Chapter 2, “Plantation Architectures” takes place in Villa Maraini, the former home of Emilio Maraini who made his fortune in sugar beet plantations and refineries centered in Terni, Italy. The villa was designed by Maraini’s brother, Otto Maraini in 1905, and stands on an artificial hill (a former dump) in the Ludovisi district of Rome where since 1948 it has played host to the activities of the Swiss Institute.
Chapter 1: Plant Histories
Singapore Botanic Gardens, 29–30 January, 2026
Chapter 2: Plantation Architectures
Swiss Institute (Rome), 25–27 March, 2026
Deadline for Abstracts: 31 August 2025
The symposium is organized by the research group “Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Plantation Architectures” led by Dr. Will Davis at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), with Dr. Rixt Woudstra (University of Amsterdam), Siddharta Perez (NUS Museum), and Pina Kalina Haas (USI). The symposium is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and is organized in collaboration with and support from Singapore Botanic Gardens, National Parks Board (Nparks), National University of Singapore Museum, the Swiss Institute (Rome), and Università della Svizzera italiana.