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Call for Papers: Plant Histories, Plantation Architectures

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June 20, 2025
call for papers, Historiography
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Plant Histories,
Plantation Architectures.

Singapore; Rome

TWO-CHAPTER SYMPOSIUM

Chapter 1: Singapore Botanic Gardens, 29—30 January, 2026

Chapter 2: Istituto Svizzero (Rome), 25—27 March, 2026

Call for Papers
Deadline: 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.

Description

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

Plant Histories focuses on the stories that plants tell about the plantation system in monsoon Asia. This first chapter of the symposium invites contributions that explore how people use plants in/as architecture, plants that travel between places, ethnobotanical relationships on and around plantations, and the historical connections that shaped the environment, people, and architecture on plantations. We are also interested in contributions (papers, performances, artworks) that reflect on the methodological challenges and affordances of thinking-with plants and their histories.

Chapter 2: Plantation Architectures
Swiss Institute (Rome), 25–27 March, 2026

Plantation Architectures re-centers the plantation as a system not only rooted in colonial geographies but also within Europe itself. In this second chapter of the symposium we welcome contributions that critically engage with the selective remembering of the past, and how Europe’s distance from sites of plantations obscured its role in the system even as it universalized itself globally. How have social, spatial, and architectural modalities informed this obfuscation? How have European claims to cosmopolitanism been grounded in histories of violence and extraction? In what ways do buildings, as architectural objects part of urban landscapes, reflect these underpinnings? 

General Information

Interested participants decide which chapter they would like to attend and indicate this in their submission. A travel bursary will be available for a limited number of participants. Please indicate in your proposal if you do not have institutional funding and require travel support. The conference language will be English. All presentations are to be made in person unless urgent circumstances prevent attendance. If participants need childcare or any other accommodations, please let us know so that it can be arranged.

Submission

Please send your abstract (max. 350 words), a short CV (max. 1 page), and preferred location of participation to: voyaging.vapors@usi.ch by 31 August, 2025. Notifications will be sent out in September. The program for each chapter of the symposium will be announced in October.

Architect Frank Mbanefo and Michael Olutusen in the CCA Archive

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June 10, 2025
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Historiography, Ibadan, Nigeria, Tropical Architecture
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Two fascinating articles and resources have been shared on the CCA website recently – Abigail Duke explores the architecture of Frank Mbanefo in ‘Weaving Modernity and Tradition’ and Asuru Lutherking Petercan examines the legacy and design philosophies of one of Nigeria’s first architects, Onafowokan Michael Olutusen

Duke writes, “In 1960, the same year that the nation gained Independence and after ten years of studying in the UK and working in the offices of Fry, Drew and Partners, Ronald Ward and Partners, and John Burnet, Tait and Partners in London, Mbanefo was invited by Godwin & Hopwood to join their office in Lagos.”

After working at Godwin and Hopwood for four years (the first Nigerian architect to do so) Mbanefo set up his own practice in 1964.

“…the Nigerian Government proposed establishing museums in four capitals—Sokoto, Maiduguri, Ibadan, and Enugu—to promote unity and establish reconciliation among the heterogeneous cultural groups across the country. While the museums in Sokoto and Maiduguri never went ahead, the National Museum in Ibadan, designed by Mbanefo, was completed in 1992. Today, it is a prominent institution and plays a vital role in promoting cultural awareness, education, and preservation for the region through showcasing the country’s rich cultural heritage. Similarly to the government’s development of architecture around the time of Independence, projects such as these museums were again tools for unification. Both the function of the museum and the style of the architecture were important.”

Petercan writes: “Onafowokan attended the Public Works Department Technical School in Lagos from 1933 to 1937—a time of questioning of the dominant colonial conventions—and went on to work as a junior technical staff member in many Nigerian and Cameroonian regions before moving to Scotland in 1946 to pursue his studies at the Royal Technical College and the University of Glasgow.

Returning to Nigeria in 1953, Onafowokan started working as a town planning officer in the Old Western Region. His knowledge and experience made a lasting impression as he moved through the departments of the Ministry of Transportation and the Ministry of Lands and Housing in Ibadan. After retiring as the Regional Chief Architect in 1968, he went into private practice under the name of Onafowokan Cityscape Group.”

Over 500 architectural drawings made by Onafowokan and his practice have been scanned and made available by Creative Commons here https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Buildings_by_Michael_Olutusen_Onafowokan

Section Only for Ikorodu Lagos State Town Hall By Onafowokan Michael Olutusen – Find & Tell Elsewhere is an initiative of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal that uses a post-custodial approach to make visible and available for research previously inaccessible architectural archives and to support local historians and researchers in sharing their work globally. The Nigeria project is a collaboration with Heritage Conservation Integration (Prof. Warebi Gabriel Brisibe, Dr EO Ola-Adisa, Arc. Yinka Williams, Abigail S. Duke, Asuru Lutherking Petercan) to curate and digitize the architectural drawings of first-generation Nigerian architects, celebrating their foundational contributions to the architectural landscape.Access to drawings of Chief Arc. Michael Olutusen Onafowokan was provided by Onafowokan Cityscape Limited, who are the custodians of his work.For more information: CCA Find and Tell Elsewhere, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151642567

You may read the articles here:

https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/95183/onafowokan-michael-olutusens-vision-of-tropical-modernism

https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/99051/weaving-modernity-and-tradition

CFP: III International Congress on Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes: Architecture, Colonialism and Labour 

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April 14, 2025
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, call for papers, Conferences, European Transnational, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, Tropical Architecture
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11-13 February 2026
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon​

After questioning Architecture, Cities and Infrastructure (2019) and Architecture, Colonialism and War (2023), the third edition of the Colonial and Post-colonial Landscapes Congress (2026) will intersect the topics of Architecture, Colonialism and Labour.: https://www.archlabour.com/cpcl-2026

Although a common topic in colonial historiography, the influence of large-scale labor on the creation of built environments—including the design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure, buildings and landscapes—has not been fully explored in the context of colonial architecture. The topic has significant implications not only for the description of past societies, but especially for the comprehension and support of present-day communities with colonial pasts and their relationship to the production of space. Connecting architecture and labor in these contexts offers a promising avenue for addressing some of the challenges encountered by postcolonial societies. These include the relationship with “Western” construction technologies and materials, scarcity of traditional building systems and their undervalued insights on climate adaptation and sustainable solutions, and persistent racial and gender inequalities in public works labor environments.

This congress welcomes contributions from diverse geographical, disciplinary, and chronological backgrounds to promote a wide and tough-provoking debate, crossing the history of colonial architecture, labour and social history and construction technology.

https://www.archlabour.com/cpcl-2026

New Publication: Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company

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March 25, 2025
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Congo, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, Ibadan, Lagos, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Our monograph Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company has just been published with Bloomsbury. We’re delighted to finally share our findings with you on the architecture of Western and Central Africa. The work begins with an critique of the archive and the UAC collections, before examining the Royal Niger Company, the development of Burutu and Lagos; the Lever’s concessions in Congo, the timber townships of Samreboi and Sapele; real estate and construction, the Kingsway Stores, and much more.

In addition to the main chapters the monograph includes specially commissioned essays from ‘responders’ as well as a series of photographic essays using previously unpublished images from the superb Unilever archives.

You can read the entire book here – it’s all open access: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350411340

Thank you to Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, Rixt Woudstra, Claire Tunstall, and our excellent responders for all their hard work and contributions.

New Article: “The Paramount Hotel, Freetown: Neocolonial Investment and the Business of Tropical Modernism in Sierra Leone” by Ewan Harrison

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February 9, 2025
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Sierra Leone, transnational, Tropical Architecture
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Full article here https://doi.org/10.4000/1393b

Source: “Paramount Hotel, Freetown,” The West African Builder and Architect, vol. 2, no. 4, July/Augst 1962. Original copyright holder unknown

Abstract:This article examines the planning of the Paramount Hotel in Sierra Leone, completed to the designs of James Cubitt & Partners in 1961, during Sierra Leone’s transition from colonial rule to independence. This paper demonstrates that the hotel was conceived of as a neocolonial instrument planned and funded by the British government’s Colonial Development Corporation to support the continued operation of British capital in a post-imperial world. At the same time, tourist-based development was a central component of economic planning in the immediate post-independence years for Sierra Leone’s political class. This paper therefore reveals that the luxury hotel played a central, if unstable, role in planning for economic futures during the ends of empire in Sierra Leone.

Liverpool School of Architecture: AHUWA Studio Field trip to Ghana 2025

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February 6, 2025
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Heritage, Historiography, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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We’ve just returned from a Liverpool School of Architecture BA3 field trip to Ghana. 17 students from the AHUWA studio visited Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast, and Aburi. We’ll be setting a theoretical design project at the former Kingsway Stores site on Accra’s High Street. Students will be using the site to test climatically appropriate design solutions, naturally cooled interiors, and how a new botanical research station, exhibition, and garden could be reimagined in the historic core of Accra.

We visited Jamestown, the Padmore Library, Accra Library, Black Star Square and various streets and buildings around central Accra.

Joe Addo kindly gave us permission to visit his home in Medina, and from there we went to the University of Ghana.

In Kumasi we visited the KNUST campus as well as the Ejisu Besease Shrine – an early 19thC shrine and one of the few surviving Asanti traditional buildings (now all UNESCO heritage sites).

The large new build with the white columns behind the glazing is going to be the new arts and architecture building on campus. It sits at the end of the road axis leading to the library and great hall. It’s not finished yet and we couldn’t visit the interior. From there we went to the Kumasi Cultural Centre to see the Nickson and Borys designed Asanti Regional Library before heading to Adum and central Kumasi. We travelled by bus to from Kumasi to Cape Coast where we visited the Cape Coast castle – with an excellent tour of its disturbing and poignant history. We returned along the coast road back to Accra to continue our buildings visits there and to the Botanical Gardens at Aburi.

We visited the dot atelier new artist studios and gallery spaces designed by Adjaye Associates too. A 3-storey rammed earth building with concrete frame and distinctive saw-tooth roof above the gallery. The clerestory windows set within the roof are north-facing. The vertical circulation has large openings offering views out over the suburb and allowing the sea-breeze to circulate through the building. A metal flashing detail was being retrofitted below the exposed concrete floor and the pisé – the mud was being eroded at that point and required some additional protection. It’s a fascinating structure and clearly an experimental project that requires fine-tuning and testing.

I gave a talk on some of our research and studies of Accra’s heritage structure for the Ghana Institute of Architects and Centre for Architecture and Arts Heritage. Architect David Kojo Derban kindly organised the event – and is pursuing an important mission to preserve, list, and celebrate the heritage structures and spaces within Ghana. David kindly showed us a project he’s been tasked with restoring. It’s the Osu Salem Presbyterian Middle Boys Boarding School – founded by the Basel Mission of Switzerland in 1843. The timber frames, shutters, windows, and verandahs were all pre-fabricated in Germany and then imported. The wattle and daub walls were infilled using local adobe, stones, and plaster. The school is now severely dilapidated and in urgent need of repair. It may not survive the next rain season.

Kingsway: Takoradi store identified

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October 16, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Heritage, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Kingsway: Takoradi store identified

When I was scanning the images for the Kingsway Stores exhibition and recent article, I came across the Takoradi Kingsway in a colour slide. It wasn’t a building I was familiar with and hadn’t seen any other references to it within the wider UAC archive. The design is also different to the other branches – it doesn’t seem to fit with the earlier Millers (old Accra) or F&A Swanzy (Kumasi) stores – nor with the James Lomax-Simpson designs found at neighbouring Sekondi and Cape Coast. The branch at Sekondi complicates things further – why would there be a Kingsway at both Sekondi and Takoradi when they’re so physically close together? The Takoradi branch is also a substantial structure – far larger than might be expected for a town of this scale. Perhaps it was used as a warehouse or depot for the wider enterprise, receiving the imported goods from the neighbouring port that had opened in the 1920s, or was it used as a regional office and retail outlet for the UAC (or one of its predecessors) when the new town and port was set out? The archives include some replanning and refurbishment plans from the 1960s but nothing on the structure’s history and design. The neo-classical facade with ionic columns in antis is also unusual – contrasting with the more moderne 1930s turrets and cantilevered canopies.

Kingsway Takoradi, Ghana: reproduced from an original in the Unilever Archive UAC/1/11/10/1/10, 1958.

I began to look at the maps of Takoradi to try to locate the structure, but couldn’t find anything on this scale – it was only when I reviewed my photos of the town that I found a contemporary image. The building is still standing and largely unaltered. It’s located amongst the other large European trading properties that were built around the customs house, train station and post office. There’s also shipping offices for Palm Line and Elder Dempster, along with a Barclays bank within this commercial cluster.

Former Kingsway Stores, Takoradi, 2022

New Journal Article: “Kingsway leads the way to modern living”: British Profit-seeking and Modernism in Ghana and Nigeria 1920–1970. Journal of Design History

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October 15, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Lagos, Nigeria, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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This article examines the operative uses of modernist design by the Kingsway Stores, an elite department store chain active across West Africa. Kingsway responded to independence by instrumentalizing a particularly modernist domesticity through a series of didactic marketing efforts and the construction of boldly modernist new stores. While it was responding to African demands, this instrumentalization of modernist design was planned and executed as a business survival strategy: modernism is here revealed as complexly imbricated with colonial and neocolonial profit-seeking.

Kingsway Apapa, Lagos, Nigeria, Reproduced from an original image in Unilever Archive, UAC/1/11/10/1/9/1

Harrison, E., Jackson, I., Addo, I. A., & Muraina, O. (2024). “Kingsway leads the way to modern living”: British Profit-seeking and Modernism in Ghana and Nigeria 1920–1970. Journal of Design History, Article epae010. https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epae010

New Paper: Stanek Ł. “Hegemony by Adaptation: Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry”

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October 10, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Eastern European, Ghana, Historiography, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Stanek Ł. Hegemony by Adaptation: Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry. Comparative Studies in Society and History. Published online 2024:1-34. Full paper available here: doi:10.1017/S0010417524000185

Soviet Uzbekistan Today (Through the Republican Press Pages). August. (Tashkent: The Uzbek Society of Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, 1963).

This paper discusses competing visions of the decolonization of Ghana’s economy during the first decade of the country’s independence from Britain (1957–1966), and the agency and horizon of choice available to the Ghanaian decision-makers in charge of implementing these visions. It focuses on Ghana’s construction industry, both as an important part of the national economy and as a condition for Ghana’s broader social and economic development in the context of colonial-era path-dependencies and Cold War competition. By taking the vantage point of mid-level administrators and professionals, the paper shows how they negotiated British and Soviet technological offers of construction materials, machinery, and design. In response to Soviet claims about the adaptability of their construction resources to Ghana’s local conditions, the practice of adaptation became for Ghanaian architects and administrators an opportunity to reflect on the needs, means, and objectives of Ghana’s construction industry, and on broader visions of Ghana’s economic and social development. Beyond the specific focus on the construction industry, this paper conceptualizes the centrality of adaptation in enforcing technological hegemony during the period of decolonization, and discusses African agency beyond the registers of extraction and resistance that have dominated scholarship on the global Cold War.

New Journal Paper: Accelerating Development: Taylor Woodrow and Arcon’s Prefabricated Steel Structures in Decolonizing West Africa

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October 2, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Ewan Harrison, Rixt Woudstra and Iain Jackson, “Accelerating Development: Taylor Woodrow and Arcon’s Prefabricated Steel Structures in Decolonizing West Africa”, ABE Journal [Online], 23 | 2024, Online since 01 October 2024, connection on 01 October 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16130

Construction of the Sapele Sawmill, Nigeria, 1946. UAC 2/13/b/7/1, reproduced with permission from an original in the Unilever Archives, UAC 2/13/B/7/1.

In 1943, in the middle of World War II, the British architects Edric Neel (1914-1952), Raglan Squire (1912-2004), and Rodney Thomas (1902-1996) created Arcon (short for Architectural Consultants). Focused on applying factory mass production systems to the building industry, Arcon engaged in an unusual, yet close, partnership with the civil engineering contracting company Taylor Woodrow. While their first project became one of Britain’s most popular post-war “prefabs,” it is little known that in the years thereafter a similar structural steel system was widely marketed in Britain’s West African colonies, where it became one of the most frequently used prefabricated building designs. Through the support of Taylor Woodrow, which acted as the agent for Arcon’s worldwide implementation, the prefabrication system was utilized in a range of contexts: to build houses for British companies, to build schools and market halls for colonial governments, and, of most interest here, to build factories and warehouses for the United Africa Company (UAC), as part of the industrialization drive that accompanied decolonization in the 1950s. The UAC was part of Unilever, and one of the largest conglomerates of trading and manufacturing interests active across “British” West Africa. It entered a partnership with Taylor Woodrow to jointly market the Arcon system, thereby profiting from the erection of its own buildings, and the sale of the Arcon system of construction to colonial and subsequently, post-colonial governments across the region. Today, Arcon structures, often sizeable sheds clad with imported metal sheets or locally available timber, can still be found across Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.

Full open access paper available here: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16130