Hi! 👋 I am an architectural historian interested in how people interact with plants to make buildings. My research and teaching uses architecture as a lens to understand histories of traditional knowledge, extraction, and agribusiness.

At the Academy of Architecture, Università della Svizzera italiana my new research project, Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Plantation Architectures is funded by an SNSF Ambizione grant (2024–2028), where I am jointly appointed at two research institutes: the Institute of the History and Theory of Art and Architecture (ISA); and the Institute of Urban and Landscape Studies (ISUP).

I was recently a Princeton Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University (2022–23), and am an Associate of the Science, Technology, and Society Cluster at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. I completed my PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021, and my dissertation project, Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture, won the Society of Architectural Historians David B. Brownlee Award.

I am also co-chair of the Society of Architectural Historians IDEAS Committee, a contributing editor to ARDETH Journal (Turin, Italy), and a founding member of ANZA East Africa (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania).

You can contact me at: davisw@usi.ch

Some recent online texts and talks:

SAH Brownlee Dissertation Award [SAH Roundtable talk 2022]

Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture [PhD Dissertation, UCLA 2021]

Prism of Difference: Bamboo, Bayanihan and the Secret Society of "ñtcllg Kztzzstzzszllg Kztñpxllzll" [Southeast of Now, October 2021]

Foreign Arms and the Economic Body [CCA Montreal, September 2021]

Seeds That Float [Architectural Theory Review, August 2021]

Loneliness, Disappearance, and the Veneer of Protection [Platform, August 2020]