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.

摘要

一个著名的轶事描述了 1850 年，年轻的威廉·勒·巴伦·詹尼 (William Le Baron Jenney) 是如何在菲律宾建造竹屋和棕榈屋而被吸引到太平洋的。Jenney 和那些将他历史化的人，将他在 19 世纪后期在芝加哥对钢架高层建筑的实验归因于对带有棕榈编织板的竹框架的这些早期印象。本文将詹妮的灵感与 1890 年至 1920 年间活跃在关岛和菲律宾的两位美国植物学家的工作结合起来，以了解分析类别的创建和学术帝国主义的结构。埃尔默·德鲁·梅里尔 (Elmer Drew Merrill) 和威廉·萨福德 (William Safford) 记录了他们在帝国猛烈过渡期间在热带地区与植物性建筑的相遇。