"I Will Burn Tuan’s House: Tobacco, Opium, and the Villa Patumbah"

Article by Will Davis published in Architecture Beyond Europe, Transactional Spaces special issue edited by Michael Faciejew and Rixt Woudstra, December 2024

Link to article: https://doi.org/10.4000/13937 

It could simply be that guilt, rather than philanthropy, was the reason that Anna Grob-Zundel, widow of the tobacco planter Karl Fürchtegott Grob, donated their luxurious family home Villa Patumbah to a charity organization in 1910. When asked why she had made this gift to Diakoniewerk Neumünster, she said that she could not live in a place built with the blood of enslaved hands. This paper considers the Zurich mansion, completed in 1885 to plans by the Swiss architects Chiodera and Tschudy, alongside the plantation in Sumatra on whose profits it was constructed. Rather than working backwards from villa to plantation, I shall consider the villa itself as a plantation by thinking through it alongside the planter economy that funded it. Here I take up Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi’s points, that the plantation is both “alien, strange, and unpredictable,” and yet it takes life under control, “space, time, flora, fauna, water, chemicals, people.” Western Europe’s colonial “reckoning” of recent years has provided new methodological opportunities for historians of built and destroyed environments, and in turn new forms of criticality for understanding sites in erstwhile metropoles and distant colonies. This paper reads material from the architectural archive: photographs from tobacco plantations in Sumatra alongside plans and drawings of the Villa Patumbah. Chiodera and Tschudy’s stylistic excesses ingratiated the Swiss public for the better part of a century, but material and metaphorical licentiousness also provides a lens for understanding the plantation in its European metamorphosis. In Switzerland, conditions of tropical violence were required for visitors to comprehend a tropics of material indulgence. Towards the end of this paper, a cryptic letter is translated. It is a clue: the villa is a site of colonial encounter without having to house the violence of the colonial act itself. Like the swirl of exhaled tobacco smoke, the plantation transmutes, absorbs, engulfs.

Out of Context workshop, Dec 2024

Plants. People. Earth. Buildings. The history of the global plantation is a history of things forced into unfamiliar contexts. In this open workshop, participants brought an object of their choosing made of naturally occurring material. By the end of the workshop these objects formed a collective story in the TAM space at the Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio.

Plantation Talks, Oct—Dec 2024

Plantation Talks explored the architectural legacies and realities of plantation landscapes in different geographies. The series invited speakers to share research that considered the plantation as conceptual model and practical method for understanding resource extraction in scarred landscapes. Budi Agustono (Universitas Sumatera, Indonesia) presented on the old town of Medan, the Kesawan, which rose to prominence during the late nineteenth-century tobacco boom in Sumatra. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (Barnard College, Columbia University, New York) discussed the abolitionist plantation for refugees from the Indian Ocean slave trade in the nineteenth century. Siddharta Perez and Rixt Woudstra presented their research as part of a workshop under the SNSF Voyaging Vapors working group.