Nipa Palm, and Architecture’s Fantasy of Material Purity

You are cordially invited to attend the lecture by Will Davis:

Date and Time: 8 Oct 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Location: SDE 1, 03-02, School Conference Room

Nipa Palm, and Architecture’s Fantasy of Material Purity

This talk critiques modernism’s tendency to isolate architectural materials as having singular, specific uses, rather than recognising their generalisable, universal roles across livelihoods and ecosystems. Using nipa palm—a versatile Southeast Asian plant often reduced to roofing—it traces how botanist David Fairchild’s 1940s vision of inexhaustible, place-based materiality gave way, within a decade, to palms and bamboo becoming tools of displacement in resettlement camps across the region.

Drawing on Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture (forthcoming), it shows how the very qualities that make these plants architecturally appealing also enabled their weaponisation against tropical populations.

Will Davis is an architectural, urban, and environmental historian whose research focuses on the political economy of architecture through plants, people, and multi-species lifeworlds from the nineteenth century to the present. This work creates space for new, interdisciplinary collaborations and conversations between architecture, crafts, political ecology, heritage studies, and postcolonial thinking.

His first book, Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture (forthcoming, University of Texas Press, 2026) examines the political ecology of the nypa fruticans palm species through a twentieth century history of architecture, resettlement, and agribusiness.

Organised by LALAHH, Laboratory for Architectural and Landscape Architectural Histories and Humanities