A girl’s legs swing from the beam; her hand steadies the baby sitting adjacent as she casts an eye towards the work happening below Figure 1. On the ground in front of the bamboo platform, two women fold nipa palm (nypa fruticans) fronds around strips of bamboo. In the background and all around them lie fronds of nipa bundled together; finished shingles sit on the ground waiting to be taken out to the beach for drying. From January to July 1940, the American botanist David Fairchild travelled around islands in the Celebes and Molucca seas – in what was then the Dutch East Indies and the US-administered Philippine Islands (today Indonesia and the Philippines) – in search of plants for his fledgling botanical garden in Miami. Unlike trips for his former employer, the US Department of Agriculture, this trip was funded by Fairchild’s friend Anne Archbold, heiress to the fortunes of Standard Oil, and he brought along his wife and friends to spend time exploring for plants and catching up with scientists and other friends in the region. Seeds, clippings and samples were sent directly back to the US for propagation or stored aboard their ship until disembarkation, a specially commissioned Chinese-style junk called the Chêng Ho (named after the Ming-dynasty admiral Zheng He), custom-built by a friend of Archbold’s in Hong Kong for the expedition. When Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the Netherlands Indies entered a state of war: landing permits were cancelled, and the Chêng Ho was obliged to sail back to Philippine waters. The Fairchild Garden Expedition was cut short, but a large part of its purpose was already fulfilled. Thousands of samples had arrived in Miami and rolls of camera film documenting the trip were ready for processing.
‘Women of Aslom Village Biliran Island weaving nipa thatch green leaves’. David Fairchild, 14 January 1940. Fairchild Archives. Call number: 3496.
In this botanist’s photograph of women fabricating roof shingles from nipa palm, I am interested in entertaining a certain romance in the viewer and a wilful acceptance of the contradiction that lies in the scene. It is one of serenity, between plants being processed by hand but recorded with a device by an intruding foreigner who recognises an act he has seen elsewhere before, an act that he appreciates, and one frequently overlooked by trained architects. Here, the stakes are how to read tactile, gendered architectural labour through the eyes and lens of imperial experts (or unlikely architects) to reveal unexpected agential categories. The story of the Fairchild Garden Expedition is a necessary context for the mobile characters that would play a role in moving people around for militaristic exploits – which cancelled Fairchild’s trip – and agribusiness that would eat up the land for plantations and other extractive enterprises, a green revolution in which Fairchild played no small role. To this end he embodies the kind of capitalist, extractivist existence that in this instance momentarily touched the everyday labour of people outside the capitalist lifeworld.
Fairchild was one of the leading figures in the transformation of agriculture into agribusiness that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States, a transfer of crop and land use that would later become the globally exported status quo. He was interested in plants that people could eat, in introducing plants to the US market that would become ‘economic’ – plants that would be useful in food or enhancing the environment. He is canonised for introducing many plants to the US market, such as soybeans, pistachios, new varieties of wheat, avocados and kale. The lone explorer in the wide world discovering edible plants, the figure of Fairchild was, even for his time, a belated trope. But for the purposes of this text he provides a convenient ploy, acting as a transitory courier between the material forms and everyday lives that animated them at the precipice of the Second World War. By 1940, the established world orders of ethnobotanical exploration, the ‘golden age’ of slow travel by steamboat and propeller plane, an emerging set of international relations, the export of scientific agribusiness expertise and an all-permeating military industrial complex are set in contrast to the everyday lives of these women weavers making plants into buildings. Fairchild interrupts and blends frames between one another, an unwitting agent of empire on the path to the green revolution, and a continuation of the lone explorer epitomised by his childhood inspiration, Alfred Russell Wallace.Footnote 1
Retracing Fairchild’s footsteps to an estuary on Biliran island, this text examines a botanist’s encounter with women making nipa palm roof shingles. Here, a plant is caught between the flux of gendered craft and the tipping point of a world at war. Fairchild took several photographs of this process from different angles, including their growth at the banks of the river Caraycaray. Here, I consider one of the photographs Fairchild took that day as a cipher for interpreting the historical moment he traversed, the palm in question and its relationship to the women in the picture. It was taken in a moment where botanists had moved away from preserving dead plants mounted on white archival paper destined for the herbarium and instead used photographic media to preserve observations of, in this case, a plant-based building practice. Photography allowed for botany – in an unlikely allyship with architecture – to become mobile. This intersection of materiality and everyday life uses Fairchild’s world-ordering lens to de-centre itself around a single plant.
As his final, perhaps most unusual expedition in the ‘Great East’, Fairchild’s photographs reveal how he interacted with plants and people. Camera in hand, he was free from the mandate of investigating potential foodstuffs for the Department of Agriculture. Hundreds of monochrome images reveal the extent to which a botanist, after a lifetime of exploration, understood plant–human interaction. Fairchild had retired from working for the Department of Agriculture, and his earlier life of setting up institutes, convincing politicians to fund trips, experimental plant programmes, laboratories and gardens, was in the past. This trip allowed his curiosity to roam, to explore the ‘spice islands’ of antiquity that lay in the seas between the Philippines and Indonesia. ‘There could scarcely be a more wonderful place for cruising’, he would ponder with a friend prior to departure, ‘than those varied seas which lie East of Java, between Borneo and New Guinea’, and indeed they were the most important sites for the development of theories of evolution (Wallace), and for Georg Eberhard Rumphius, the ‘Pliny of the Indies’.Footnote 2 The large region continues to be the site of contemporary research centres and major efforts for species conservation and plant biologists.
Why write with Fairchild to address these questions? He already has two biographies, a tropical botanical garden to his name, and has authored several books that are part memoir, part adventure story. In carrying out his finding expeditions Fairchild was engaging empires; in sourcing plants along the tropical band and bringing them to the US for replanting, he played a role in re-engineering biological world systems. In this expedition, he introduces us to the American Pacific and the colonial geography of Southeast Asia. Yet in contrast to this geopolitical compass, his research also embodies paradoxical qualities. In order to understand how plants grew and thrived required care and attention, awareness of environment and constant interaction with local people who would guide the visitors to locations of specific plants. Plants do not care about the stereotypes that humans attach to them, they are, as he would say, part of ‘a world which knows no national boundaries’.Footnote 3 As the nipa palm shows us, plants themselves may also contain contradictory traits, opportunistic and fragile, gregarious and timid, traits of which local people were highly aware. Following Fairchild between the tenuous jurisdictions of the Celebes and Moluccas, teetering between empires on the brink of war, allows for a topical focus on plant livelihoods among these islands and the conditions that hampered the expedition. Fairchild struggled to comprehend the swirl of confusion that accompanied this moment and ‘the insanity of making things to kill other human beings’.Footnote 4 War officially ended the expedition when the group were in Ambon, where a single cablegram ‘upset the life in this quiet village’, and saw thrown into jail ‘men and women who the day before had been lunching or playing cards together’.Footnote 5 They were directed to leave the Dutch East Indies and return to the Philippine Islands by the most direct route possible. Writing in his 1943 account of the trip, Garden Islands of the Great East, Fairchild frequently wonders what became of his team when war re-routed the expedition and scattered its members. Two were sent to internment camps in the Philippines and barely survived; the crew returned to Hong Kong; others remained missing.Footnote 6
The alignment of botany and photography enabled the convergence of distant plant knowledge to be transferred and fixed in an image. Even though ‘science and traditional knowledge may ask different questions and speak different languages’, as Potawatomi scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us, ‘they may converge when both truly listen to the plants’.Footnote 7 The Fairchild Expedition was different from previous collecting missions because it was chiefly for collecting plants and their seeds to build a botanical garden, meaning that Fairchild’s aperture for discovery was wide, so to speak, for everything and anything that could be hurriedly brought back to the US before the curtain of war fell.
Setting sail
Anne Archbold spent the latter decades of her life traveling, hunting, exploring, funding scientists and joining them in their pursuits. It was Archbold who commissioned a friend of her son, Captain Thomas Kilkenny, to fit out a boat in Hong Kong for the expedition, asking Fairchild to help plan the construction to accommodate plant collecting. A ten-foot square laboratory was built amidships on the junk, housing a writing desk, microscope table and drying tunnel for preparing seeds to be packed for air transport. Though it had sails, their junk was fitted with two diesel engines, with the sails only used occasionally. When it was launched from Hong Kong, the Chêng Ho was blessed by a priest who held a ceremony on the high rear deck, and a shrine to the goddess of the sea, Tin Hau (天后), was placed in the laboratory with incense burning all around. On board with Fairchild, Archbold and Kilkenny were Marian (Fairchild’s wife), Kilkenny’s seafaring son, Hugo Curran (American forestry expert who had grown up in the Philippines), and Edward Beckwith (an explorer and chemist who served as the trip’s official photographer). An additional eight crew members manned the ship, all of them seafarers from Hong Kong with whom Kilkenny had previous sailing experience.Footnote 8
Meandering through the archipelagic Visayas on the way to Celebes (present-day Sulawesi), the junk stopped at several small islands for the group to find palm samples. Stepping ashore in January 1940, Fairchild remembered ‘with pleasure the Krai Krai [Caraycaray] river on Biliran Island, where the nipa palms were growing beautifully’.Footnote 9 The series of photographs do not appear in Garden Islands of the Great East; however, following the threads between Fairchild’s description of the visit to Biliran and photographs in the Fairchild archives, it is possible to piece together his encounter with nipa palm. Unusual in that its stems are seldom visible above the mud in which they grow, and the roots grow directly from the lower surface of their stems, Fairchild and Archbold set about ‘photographing the strange, underground stems of this unique palm’, Fairchild’s lens directed to the base of the palm where it meets the muddy banks.Footnote 10 After rambling along the banks of the Caraycaray, we are led to a beach where repeating sections of nipa shingles are laid out to dry. In one of these photographs, the ocean can be seen in the background; in another angle of the same scene, nipa and bamboo houses can be seen in the background. Finally, they move to the interior space, where Fairchild and Archbold took to ‘watching some of the women sewing the leaves into thatch for the roofs of their houses’.Footnote 11
The process of stitching together nipa shingles is seldom recorded on camera, by architects or anyone else, despite the ubiquity of the process and the resulting houses in tropical Southeast Asia. The scene Fairchild captures is an intimate one, even mundane, of female labour and generational transmission of knowledge in action between elders, mothers and children. It clearly reveals how this process of building fabrication is a gendered architectural pursuit that involves knowledge of how plants grow, where they are to be found, and the skills necessary for their manipulation. Fairchild links in short succession the processing of nipa from growing palms by the riverbank into building material. I wondered, looking at this photograph of the interior space, if Fairchild and Archbold had asked these women to remain still to accommodate a slower shutter speed for the darker space. I wondered what these women thought of the unexpected visitor with his domed pith helmet, khaki slacks, and boxy metal camera hanging from around his neck. I wondered if he stood there a while or mounted the camera on a tripod. Fairchild describes in other parts of Garden Islands how he communicated with locals, noting that despite being able to communicate with officials and schoolmasters in Malay, the small islands of the Celebes and Moluccas contained many other languages and dialects where, being unable to communicate directly with them, ‘the men in the villages and in the bush understood better the universal language of signs’.Footnote 12 In his example, Fairchild and Hugo Curran carried a cellophane bag full of palm seeds and flowers, pointing to it to indicate to a local that they were looking for similar such seeds.Footnote 13 It is likely that some mixture of signs and broken verbal language were the means of communication that Fairchild had with these women. In a different context, though one in which the case is still that of the fabrication of the ‘hut’ through everyday female labour, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi prompts us to think about how the structure of the East African tuqul, because of its female fabrication, ‘chang[es] people’s relationships to the land in plain sight and through gendered precision’.Footnote 14 The historiographical agency of these unnamed, once-known women in 1940 is different from that of the historically overlooked female architect trained in a design school because the nature of this craft sees it in concert with the traditionally male labour of bamboo construction.Footnote 15 Nonetheless it is the agency of a situated knowledge that the women have, inadvertently recognised by a male botanist (Fairchild) and his female companion (Archbold).Footnote 16
Architecture as ecofantasy
Fairchild’s photographs of nipa palm construction present architecture with a twofold dilemma: its relationship to the lightweight tropical dwelling, and its relationship to photography. The photograph, lightweight and mobile itself, transports a vision of the world across time and space. It is itself a crucial tool of the architect-as-researcher: images of structures in different settings – whether sketched, painted or photographed – had always been an integral aspect of architectural education. But while the large scale-drawings synonymous with a Beaux Arts architectural education (and essentially the art of copying) were a tool of the nineteenth century where materiality was a matter of shading and texture, the photograph presented architects with a novel twentieth-century specificity in which buildings were textured subjects that often found themselves complemented by the presence of people in the frame.Footnote 17
Although the mania for World Fairs in the US and Europe informed the visual narrative fantasy of rustic huts for rustic people, a botanist and plant collector in the tropics would have encountered these building types from a completely different perspective: if a fantasy, then an ecological one, not least because they lived in such houses on their tours. Prior to his arrival on Biliran island, several moments appear to have prepared him for the encounter. In the Philippines Fairchild and his wife stayed for several weeks in a thatched guest house at Makiling Arboretum in Los Baños, Luzon. The ‘Bahay Kubo’ in which they stayed belonged to the head of Forest Services, Florencio Tamesis. Fairchild recalled that this ‘perfect place’ – a ‘charming “bird cage” set on stilts under great overhanging forest trees’ – also included ‘perfectly designed and executed examples of palm furniture’.Footnote 18 The construction of such a house, attuned to the tropics with ‘walls of woven bamboo matting, a floor of narrow split pieces of bamboo, set wide apart so that the air circulated freely through it, and a roof of thatch made from the leaves of the nipa palm … open spaces under the roof where the winds could blow through, but the overhang was so wide that no rain came in’ would have been fresh on his mind by the time they arrived at Biliran and he took time (and valuable space on a roll of 120 mm film) to photograph nipa. In contrast with his enthusiasm for the thatched house, Fairchild notes in the same chapter how he and his wife stayed in Manila at the ‘impressive but uncomfortable residence’ of the American High Commissioner, which had been ‘designed by Washington architects who obviously knew little of life in the tropics’.Footnote 19 He had marvelled from the window of a KLM plane from Surabaya to Bandung, where
roofs of bamboo-shingles, thatch, or weathered tile were universal. … I knew the walls of the houses were made by splitting bamboo stems into strips and weaving them together; that the floors were made of the same material; the drinking cups, the buckets, the brooms, the spoons, the forks, and every imaginable utensil in the house likewise, all from plants ‘grown on the place’, and that the boundary lines which divided the various households was some pattern of bamboo fencing.Footnote 20
By the time of his encounter with women weaving at Biliran island, he would have been sufficiently curious about how this climatically attuned plant-become-architecture was constructed.
In his photograph of women making nipa shingles, a woman returns the gaze of the camera. The singular glance of an unnamed woman pierces through the veneer of scientific analysis and forces us to consider the women’s work taking place. A moment of nonchalance as the eye of the camera is met, the gaze is important because it goes further than the manufacture taking place. In this instance the camera shutter, as Ariella Azoulay notes, is not a ‘metaphor for the operation of imperial power, but it is a later materialisation of an imperial technology’ – one that evolved, camera and imperialism, concomitantly.Footnote 21 The female subjects in Fairchild’s encounter who momentarily return the gaze of visitor and viewer appear to refuse the photographic subjection depicting them at work. It is a rupture, eyes staring back across the distance of the Pacific, but what do they say? Do they reject the gaze of the camera, as their expression appears to? Recalling Azoulay again,
thinking about imperial violence in terms of a camera shutter means grasping its particular brevity and the spectrum of its rapidity. It means understanding how this brief operation can transform an individual rooted in her life-world into a refugee, a looted object into a work of art, a whole shared world into a thing of the past, and the past itself into a separate time zone, a tense that lies apart from both present and future.Footnote 22
Though there is a recognition of the work by Fairchild, a returned gaze raises the possibility that she was reluctant to share it: a temporary fissure between an outsider’s expectation and her reality. In this photographic event, the force of the camera is returned or even repelled by the woman’s gaze, marking the interrupted privacy of the moment and at the same time highlighting the intimacy of building fabrication as intergenerational learning, childcare and economic activity.
A moment of tension like this reveals just how much of a private act the enacting of local knowledge can be. The people who built the roofs, walls and furniture that Fairchild marvelled at thus far in his trip had remained curiously absent from the act of fabrication (whereas the plants, an example of which can be seen pictured in Figure 2, took center stage). And yet the pursuit of plant knowledge relied on local knowledge. This reliance is described by Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez as ‘sovereign vernaculars’, where even while botanists sought to align tropical plants with Linnaean structure and nomenclature, alternative knowledges of nature persisted, local ‘insight into plants that made and unmade the science’.Footnote 23 Botany and botanists existed because of their coming into contact with local plant knowledge, as this instance of Fairchild’s encounter with women weaving fronds of nipa palm into roof shingles illustrates.Footnote 24 And though he documented each part of the process, from nipa growing by the riverbanks to their fabrication and subsequent drying in the sun, there is perceivable distance between him and the privacy of the exact moment of fabrication. Even in the most intimate of spaces, then, there is a distance between botanist and builder. Just as architects from the Global North have perceived ‘vernacular architecture’ in an othering process that places the majority of worldly building types into the vaguely circumscribed ‘everything else’ category, it is important to point out just how persistently architects, like botanists, have overlooked the presence of people in the frame. That this photograph was not reproduced in his book about the expedition, despite him describing the encounter in words, raises the question of whether Fairchild found some discomfort in this specific glance. What it tells us about the relationship between plants and people is that while fabrication is a social activity, it is also an intimate one in terms of both tactility of handwork and the familial ties embedded in the process. In keeping with the thematic index of considering world orders through the lens of everyday life, in this instance the roles are flipped, and everyday life is depicted through the lens of a world order.
Nypa fruticans growing in Singapore Botanic Gardens, 2023. Photograph by the author.
Everyday lives, ‘plant immigrants’ and photographs on the move
Through the lens of a Rolleiflex medium format camera, Fairchild took a photograph of a woman looking back at him, while the palm itself, being the object of his curiosity, was busy creating the subjecthood for the women in the frame. Do they know what the camera is doing to them? The practised response of seeing a camera and photographer, a smile, is not present, but their expression is more complicated than reluctance. At a time when most rural Filipinos still lit their homes with tinghoy lamps after dark (a wick floating in coconut oil in the half shell of a coconut), the presence of a person with a camera on a small island brought the metaphysical baggage of a selective modernity with it. Even if the camera itself was unfamiliar, the idea of a small black mechanised object, handheld technology, would have been associated with money and mobility. I wonder what to make of this gaze, then, a touch of contact between two worlds, of mobile people with handheld recording devices, and those so distant from it to be worthy of some moments of their curiosity.
The intended destination for the 3,000 photographs taken by Fairchild and the expedition’s official photographer, Edward Beckwith, was a series of lantern shows around the US on their return. Fairchild imagined how he and Marian would describe their photographs to paying audiences in darkened auditoriums as they travelled home across the Pacific, ‘planning the lectures we thought of giving to advertise our show of new plant immigrants’.Footnote 25 Still a popular method for scientists to share their work in the contexts of public libraries and museums, lantern shows allowed for far more photographs to be shown and the storytelling details that were difficult to convey in print publication. While the everyday lives of those framed in Fairchild’s photographs continued, the act of the lantern show expanded and stretched these moments in the Pacific into frozen, repeated stories across new contexts translated for a different audience.
The expedition came to an abrupt close at Ambon on 10 May 1940, when 7,000 miles away Germany invaded the Netherlands. The expedition group looked on as the implications of war unravelled around them in this small port town. Overseas Germans were imprisoned, along with suspected European Nazi sympathisers. The Fairchild expedition members were ordered to leave the Dutch East Indies, under direct orders from Batavia, and not to stop at any of the Moluccan islands on the return route to the Philippines, where the group would find onward travel back to the US and elsewhere. When they left Manila, saying goodbye to their friends there, Fairchild reminisced that he never imagined ‘how complete would be the silence which was to envelop them’.Footnote 26 The ecological plant fantasies jostling for attention in Fairchild’s cosmos would have to wait until they came to be planted in Miami at his garden (affectionately nicknamed ‘the Kampong’ after the Malay term for village), but his photographs remained temporally fixed across the distance of silence that enveloped them. The banks of this estuary could be anywhere in Southeast Asia, given the ubiquity of this species of palm and the practice of weaving palm shingles. But like the women who are left unnamed, it is specific. This specificity changes how we think about unnamed, gendered architectural agency and the unlikely architects that recognise it.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the audiences that heard various versions of this article at conferences and invited talks in Lisbon, Honolulu, La Union, and Hong Kong. Thank you to the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida, for permission to use the photograph by David Fairchild. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers at Transactions for their thoughtful and productive comments.
Funding Statement
I would like to acknowledge Princeton University’s Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities, and the Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione scheme, both of which provided support during the writing of this article.
Open access
