Voyaging Vapors is hosted by the Academy of Architecture, Università della Svizzera italiana, where it is integrated with the Institute of the History and Theory of Art and Architecture (ISA); and the Institute of Urban and Landscape Studies (ISUP). The project runs from 2024 until 2028 and is generously funded by the Ambizione scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation (project number 216182).

Morning haze over tobacco crops; smoke curling from a tobacco pipe; vaporous opium fumes; a tobacco barn in flames. The plantation system in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia was a mix of substances in transport and transformation, afforded by violent processes crucial to a system of land expropriation. This project takes a wide-angle view of the architecture of the plantation and the plantation as conceptual formation.

Architectural spaces mediated and scripted this system 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, where, by the late-nineteenth century, tobacco drying barns and planters’ houses; packing facilities in entrepôt port cities; shops, tea-houses, and advertising in colonial metropoles were fixtures in the architectural pantheon of a globalized plantation culture.

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.