Seeds That Float

Abstract

A well-known anecdote describes how a young William Le Baron Jenney, traveling the Pacific in 1850, was taken by the construction of bamboo and palm houses in the Philippines. Jenney, and those that historicized him, attributed his experimentation with steel-frame tall buildings in Chicago later in the nineteenth century to these early impressions of bamboo framework with palm-woven panels. This paper proposes a contextualization of Jenney’s inspiration alongside the work of two American botanists active in Guam and the Philippines between 1890 and 1920 in order to understand the creation of analytical categories and the texture of academic imperialism. Elmer Drew Merrill and William Safford recorded their encounters with plant-based architecture in the tropics during a period of violent imperial transition. These vignettes of viewership reveal how unstable claims about a changing environment were validated through the interpretation of plants animated through human interaction as building materials rather than inert timber.