An Architectural History of Tea and Chocolate

Anne Hultzsch is an architectural historian and architect, as well as lead of the ERC-funded group ‘Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900’ (WoWA) at ETH Zurich. She has taught and researched at ETH, the Bartlett, UCL, AHO Oslo, Queen Mary University of London, NYU London, and Greenwich University, among others. Her research draws on intersectional feminism to study the reception and use of architectures and landscapes between ca. 1650 and 1930, focusing on gender, class, print cultures, perception, and travel. She is the author of Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception 1640-1950 (2014) and has edited The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture, and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century (with Mari Hvattum, 2018) and The Origins of the Architectural Magazine in Nineteenth-Century Europe (The Journal of Architecture, 2020). Currently, she is working on the edited book Women Writing Architecture: Expanding Histories 1700-1900 (with Sol Pérez Martínez, gta Verlag, 2025) and a monograph provisionally entitled Listen to Her! Writing and Architectural Agency Around 1800.

What do tea and chocolate have to do with architecture? And its histories? In this lecture, I unpack the relationship that unfolded between architecture and the trading and consuming of hot beverages like tea and chocolate between ca. 1500 and 1900. I do this to showcase how architecture, through its makers and users, reflects histories of global integration triggered by exploration, extraction, and imperialism. While constructing this intersectional history of architecture, we meet a diverse crowd of actors: women managing spaces, workers building sites of power, and servants maintaining groundbreaking designs of architects.
We start in an 18th-century French salon, where a family gathers over a cup of chocolate, then travel to London, to join the tea table of a fashionable hostess. Both spaces are managed by women and designed by the most successful architects of their moment. We then trace tea and chocolate to the places where they were grown, traversing continents and centuries in the process, taking in multiple architectural styles. We meet the overseer and the worker besides the tea plantation bungalow, learning about this colonial building type, after witnessing the fateful encounter between Aztecs and Spaniards and the ensuing global spread of chocolate (among other goods and people).  
We end by joining workers in a French chocolate factory, an early cast-iron skeleton structure and an emblem of the industrial revolution, pondering the question of what these multiple histories can tell us about how we make, use, and maintain architectures today. If you could ask any of the characters in this lecture a question – what would it be?