Every building (or place for that matter) is simultaneously an archive and generator of scent. Our homes, schools, banks, buses- they are filled with the scent of bodies, sweat, dust, food, cleaning products, chemicals. They are born and decay, live their lives in tandem with ours. They give and receive odors freely; some unselfconsciously, some with deliberate intention. Some places have more obvious and idiosyncratic identities than others; flower shops, perfume counters, bakeries… others are more notorious in character; public washrooms, hospitals, locker rooms. Scents, ranging from the sweet to the putrid, form an invisible landscape in which each of us is an agent and actor (transmitter/receiver?), giving an intangible yet infinite (subjective? individual?) texture/structure to our cities and lives; one we don’t often notice until it is lost.
Smell, despite being the most elusive and ethereal of our senses, is the one most deeply connected to time (inherent in its ephemeral nature) and memory, emotions and instincts, the unconscious and general well-being. It acts in the most primordial and immediate way. It is the sense that is the most accessible to the brain; its signals are not mediated by secondary routes or the thalamus, going directly from the olfactory bulb to the cortex.
It is also our most animalistic sense – a chemical sense, it “was the first sense to appear in mobile life-forms that emerged on the earth, and it is the only sense that the most primitive single-celled creatures share with us today” (Herz, The Scent of Desire, p13). Paradoxically straight-forward in its operation, smelling occurs with every inhalation of air, setting forth instinctual reactions in our bodies unwittingly and involuntarily.
In certain cultures the tight relationship between time, place, and scent is deep and explicit: “In the Andaman Island, time is conceived of as a succession of odors. The seasons of the year are named after the fragrant flowers in bloom at the time- a calendar of scents. Among the pastoral Dassanetch of Ethiopia there is also a succession of odors, alternating the sweet smell of new grass in the rainy season, with the acrid smoke of burning old growth in the dry; the good and bad smells of life and death, renewal and decay.” (Lyall Watson, Jacobson’s Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell, p80)
Marshall McLuhan, in his Understanding Media, describes how time in non-literate cultures is not known as uniform incremental units to endure, but as something inseparable from the “rhythms of human experience.” Acts such as eating and sleeping served bodily needs, not the abstracted mechanized time of clocks.
“The most integral and involving time sense imaginable is that expressed in the Chinese and Japanese cultures. Until the coming of the missionaries in the seventeenth century, and the introduction of the mechanical clocks, the Chinese and Japanese had for thousands of years measured time by graduations of incense. Not only the hours and days, but the seasons and zodiacal signs were simultaneously indicated by a succession of carefully ordered scents. The sense of smell, long considered the root of memory and the unifying basis of individuality, has come to the fore again in the experiments of Wilder Penfield. During brain surgery, electric probing of brain tissue revived many memories of the patients. These evocations were dominated and unified by unique scents and odors that structured these past experiences. The sense of smell is not only the most subtle and delicate of the human senses; it is, also, the most iconic in that it involves the entire human sensorium more fully than any other sense. It is not surprising, therefore, that highly literate societies take steps to reduce or eliminate odors from the environment. B.O., the unique signature and declaration of human individuality, is a bad word in literate societies. It is far too involving for our habits of detachment and specialist attention. Societies that measured time scents would tend to be so cohesive and so profoundly unified as to resist every kind of change.” (McLuhan, p146)
Our relationship to scent/smells (and thus our bodies and environments) have become distant in contemporary culture. In the design of our cities and buildings, scent is not considered other than to banish or mask its presence. This condition can be traced to the nineteenth century’s drive to eliminate odors (thought of as carriers of disease) in the name of hygiene and public health. Modern materials and finishes are chosen to give the illusion of odorless blankness. Rodolphe el-Khoury calls this “the aesthetic of cleanliness” and argues that “olfactory vigilance ultimately served to reorganize the environment according to the dialectic of transparency and opacity” (Assemblage, Dec 96, p31).
The flat timeless abstract neutrality of modern architecture is achieved through its deliberate suppression of sensory experience, especially that of olfaction. As Richard Neutra warned in his article The Sound and Smell of Architecture, “we must guard against the notion that the only sense perceptions which really count are those which are easily and consciously perceived. On the contrary, one might say that an environmental influence may be particularly pernicious where the consciousness does not correct it” (Progressive Architecture, Nov 49, p65). Though this was written half a century ago, very little has changed.
The primacy of vision is evident everywhere we turn. This was not slow in the making- from Greek philosophy, to the Renaissance discovery of perspective and Alberti’s winged eye, the visual sense has reigned supreme. And here we are, driving past blinding signage and navigating our lives and cities with our eyes. It is the sense we are most conscious of, and the one we believe we trust most. I understand that this was and still is necessary for the development of our species. I’m just unsure what we are progressing towards. Or perhaps I fear that in our rush to exploit our visual advantage, other dimensions of our lives and selves are left diminished and forgotten.
For example, it disturbs me sometimes that supermarkets and grocery stores are largely devoid of scent. Sure, our produce must be shipped in out of season and unripe to keep things running on time. And I do admit it is more convenient to get my meat precut and packaged. And yes, around the bakery it often smells of fresh baking. In fact, many supermarkets pump the smell of fresh bread by their entrances to draw in customers. The same tactic is used in shopping malls with the scent of baking cookies, even where there are no fresh cookies to be found.
While it may seem ‘considerate’ of the stores to provide positive scents for their consumers to shop to, it can also seen as highly manipulative. Much research and development in the fragrance industry has been centered in the area of subliminal "nasal persuasion". The idea is to project "olfactory character" into commercial spaces to produce a memorable shopping experience (consciously and unconsciously). Muzak LLC (of elevator music fame) is now in collaboration with ScentAir Technologies, Inc. to provide scent and sound installations for retail stores and shopping malls. Avery Gilbert’s What the Nose Knows paints another interesting picture of this: “This application has been fully embraced in one large business sector: the gaming industry. Las Vegas is the trend’s epi-center; half the major properties on the Strip have scent systems. The MGM Grand has deployed as many as nine scents simultaneously around its property, and the Venetian features a corporate logoscent called ‘Seduction.’ In their quest to fine-tune consumer experience, casinos have made sensory engineering a priority. Guest rooms are kept chilly to discourage visitors from spending too much time in them. Complex floor plans channel patrons farther into the gaming areas, where clocks are banished, along with views of the outside world” (Gilbert, p171).
At the other end of the spectrum, the bad smells of our society are channeled discreetly to the edges of our cities and consciousness. The odors of waste, garbage, illness, death and decay are concentrated in our landfills, sewers, waste water treatment centers, and abattoirs. There was a time when this distance did not exist, a time when people lived with their refuse and decay (sure, out of necessity). Ancient Roman streets were designed to accommodate the travel of both goods and waste. Deep with intermittent stepping stones (for crossing without having to wade through garbage), one can imagine the intense stench that accompanied their daily lives. With the construction of the Cloaca Maxima, waste was more efficiently and hygienically diverted to the Tiber. While I greatly appreciate the olfactory comfort afforded to us by our modern infrastructural systems, I also can’t help but feel that something has been lost in the rush to drive out smells from our cities and lives. Now that smell is commonly used to mask and manipulate, our experience of it has become so disconnected from real matter and phenomena.
Fragrance has been used throughout history to mask and manipulate in subtle ways. It was used not only to mask but also to reveal. Spirituality and scent have long been associated. Incense plays a large role in many religions and rituals (Catholicism, Buddhism). From Evliya Çelebi's
Book of Travels: Land and People of the Ottoman Empire in the Seventeenth Century, a brief glimpse of the scented sanctity is described. “The Ipariye Mosque was built by a wealthy merchant trading with China. He had seventy loads of musk of Khotan mixed into the mortar for its walls, which is why it is called the Ipari – that is, musk-scented – mosque. And indeed, if one sniffs, in humid weather, near its walls, one’s nose gets perfumed with the fragrance of musk.”(p137)
What do I seek to understand about scent and architecture? I like that smells and odors can operate in the same way as architecture does, both occupying and creating space. They physically take up and give form to arbitrary space, but more importantly, they create a sort of imaginary space, encompassing past and present, recalling people and events beyond/outside of themselves. They provide settings for drama and experience. They are in the background, almost invisible, yet they are capable of collapsing and connecting time. I like to imagine a time, imagine myself existing in a time and place when scent and architecture were more obviously intertwined. Perhaps I’d only have to travel back to my childhood, when every smell was novel, new, of substance, deserving of notice… like stepping into a building for the first time. What were the smells of my childhood? My grandmother’s cooking, my mom’s hair, the scent of many bodies living in a small space, confined. The autumn leaves, spring worms. Mown grass in the summer, mixed with gasoline and barbecue coming from the next yard. The non-smell of fresh snowfall, mixed with the dankness of wet hats and mittens that characterized winter.
There are some smells I didn’t appreciate until they were gone, or until I inhaled them out of context. One, a memory of a memory, is how my clothes would smell of campfire and sweat as I took them from my bag. Alone in my room I’d sift through the events of the past days.
My mother goes through bouts of depression, during which she loses her appetite. She appears listless and lost. Not having meals or hunger to punctuate her days, she further loses track of her bodily needs, spiraling more and more into desolation.
Another memory of my mother: as children, when we were sick and congested with a serious cold, she would find her little bottle of
medicinal green ointment. I don’t know its proper name – the English translation of what we called it is simply “oil”. This ointment was serious- its pungent smell could fill a room upon opening the bottle. With the backs of our shirts stretched over our heads, she would scrape the oil into our backs with a spoon. The next day everything would stink but we’d inevitably feel much better. I haven’t smelled it in over a decade, and I can’t exactly describe the smell- maybe a mixture of wood, green and hotness? (stings the nose if sniffed too closely). What I do know is that if I caught even the faintest whiff of it now, I could place it in a second.
When my grandfather died, a lot of incense was burned. A lot. Pack after plastic-wrapped pack of sickly sweet incense, bought in Chinatown, silently driven to Kingston, and burned in my childhood house, or at his grave. We were told his ghost or spirit was present if the ash did not fall from the stick, that it was a fortuitous sign that he was with us, watching over us, protecting us. In these moments my grandmother would grow serene, her face calmer in the red glow of the altar.
Memories imply loss, or passing, being lost in memories, time lost and regained in remembering.
I am a bit claustrophobic when it comes to strangers. Being closed in I panic and plan my escape. But I also find comfort in being extremely close with a lover, their weight pressing on me, their smell invading, their heat enveloping me. It feels like home. There is an overwhelming desire to disappear into them, have them breathe me in, hold their breath with me inside.
Is there comfort in losing yourself? Consolation in surrendering to something other to yourself? Why does this feeling of being engulfed in the moment, in the awareness of present, happen so rarely? Details… are they important? We’ve been taught that they are. Do they make experience richer or detract from the more important things… are the details of our experience are largely unknown to us? What if they quickly disappear or were only shadows to begin with?
News Flash:
“Leonard Bernstein’s children have donated the carefully preserved contents of his main composing studio to Indiana University, which has promised to recreate the space. The items run from the deeply meaningful to the banal. They include Bernstein’s stand-up composing table; a conducting stool that may have been used by Brahms, given as a gift by the Vienna Philharmonic; an electric pencil sharpener; a telephone; an ashtray and disposable lighters; 39 Grammy-nomination plaques; and a piece of the Berlin Wall.”
from
Berstein's Workroom Will Head to Indiana by Daniel J. Wakin,
Published: March 8, 2009 in The New York Times
Why is there a human compulsion to preserve, to pack away things as they are, to have a record of them as they were? The actual thing we strive to keep or archive is usually not the physical thing being conserved. It is rarely the thing itself that is significant but rather the memories or ideas the thing holds.
Is there magic in re-creation, replication, reconstruction? Are we the only animals who feel this need to memorialize the past? Perhaps as we gradually lost our instincts we gained our capacity for memory. Maybe our need for memory makes up for what we’ve lost in connection to our bodies and environments. Is it that we look to connect to things outside of ourselves, extend ourselves in an effort to again know how it feels to be at home the world?
For the past eight years it seems like I’ve measured time with cigarettes… cigarettes smoked, cigarettes to be smoked, packs of cigarettes to buy, first cigarettes of the day, after meals, smokes with friends, strangers, alone. I’m not sure what paced my days before I fell in love with smoking… perhaps I lived in a zone without structure… It will never cease to amaze me that that a ten centimeters of matter, stuffed with tobacco, somehow disappears into my body, stings my throat on the way down, re-emerging grey blue and immaterial from my lips. In roughly five minutes it is gone, and I carry on with my day for the next hour or two, sometimes already anticipating the next one.
I acknowledge that a part of this has to do with my body’s conditioned need for nicotine. What was once an innocent rebellious indulgence is now one of the only expressions of my bodily instincts. This is kind of sad. Another bodily rhythm of mine that is a bit scrambled is my sleep/wake cycle. Somehow my waking hours are now nocturnal. Like an insomniac, in darkness, perhaps hiding from the clarity of day.
What am I arguing for?
A more immediate way of experiencing world? A portal to the immediate as a break from reality? A deeper physiological memory? More intimacy with our bodies, instincts and environments? Opportunities to engage our more basic, primal, unconscious selves?
I want to design a space (or series of spaces) capable of triggering instinct. A part of this would be rendering palpable smells and exploring/anticipating their effects on the body and mind. How can this forgotten sense can be used in architecture, in conjunction with sight, sound, and touch (with temperature, air movement, humidity), to create spaces that are, in a way, sublime and primordial?
Can architecture help forge a closer relationship between body and mind, the conscious and unconscious? What can it teach us about ourselves? This desire is a response to what I see to be a sense of disconnection in this age of speed, technology and information. I feel the need to reconsider the numbness of our sterile modern lives and environments, or at least find a foil for it; an alternative just as extreme.
2890 words
Vien Nguyen
11/03/2009
major players:
The Scent of Desire, by Rachel Herz
What the Nose Knows, by Avery Gilbert
Invisible Architecture, ed. Anna Barbara and Anthony Perliss
Dear Donald,
This paper is more like purge of my thoughts and feelings on the possible thesis (ones I’ve been holding in my head for the past while) than a real proposal… In parts it is pretty navel-gazing and self-absorbed – sorry! It jumps around a lot, goes into some (unimportant?) things too much and others (perhaps more interesting?), not enough.
I feel good, though, that they are out and on the table to look at and scrap as my thesis develops and focuses. It is just shy of 3000 words – not quite the 5000 you were looking for.
There is sort of a new direction I’m thinking of taking the topic – I’ll try to articulate it better at the group meeting - that has to do more with human instinct than scent/smell in particular.
Anyway, I hope it is not too painful to read. And thanks for making me do this.
V
