THIS BUILDING SMELLS... FUNKY

One of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had was when I was walking through Amsterdam and suddenly when encountering the scent of the still brewing beer from a nearby brewery, I was transported to the age of about 8 playing tag with my best friends: Jaimen, Alex, Jordan and a few other forgotten names. After school in the playground waiting to be picked up by our mothers; the summer sun is baking the pitch-black tar, Table Mountain glistens in the distance and, oddly enough, this intoxicating sweet malty, wheaty, yeasty aroma is making the air thick like syrup. That aroma was coming from the beer brewery in Claremont close to my school, and still to this day if I encounter that smell, I get taken back to my carefree days of cavorting about jungle gyms with my buddies and my primary school crush on Jessica. “But a whiff of perfume, or even the slightest odor, can create an entire environment in the world of the imagination.” (Bachelard, Jolas, Danielewski, & Kearney, 2014, pp 191) With that said, please, take a moment, and smell the magazine you’re reading. Close your eyes, and take a deep inhale of the room you’re standing in. Go into the attic passage between Oost and West in Bouwkunde and pay attention! Smell it! Doesn’t it smell weird? Different at least? Distinctive? The same counts for the Bouwkunde library, as you step into this space not only is there an audio-visual change: the silence and the wonderful rhythm of the book clad walls; but also, a scent that is loaded with all kinds of memories and associations. Hospitals. Old age homes. Green Houses. Public swimming pools. Bakeries. Your childhood attic. Your Grandparent’s home. Your Mother’s clothes cupboard. A Christmas tree near the fire place. Grass after it’s been mowed.

This builing smells... funky

For this reason, the text of this article has been printed vertically instead of horizontally. By doing so, you are forced to rotate the magazine, whereby you come to acknowledge briefly the fact that you are indeed reading something. In this way, we have made the words of this article, wordy. Similarly, one of the pages of this article are left blank, to make you stop and think, and realise that you expect text or image to be on every page, instead, there is not. In this way you become more aware of your interaction with the magazine again. It might make an uneasy feeling, but in this way we’ve made the physical pages more pagey.

What you analyse, be it in terms of smell, touch, sound etc. can then be reimplemented into your building to make it a more authentic representation of how you have perceived reality outside of that building. Choose to treat Architecture as an art, impart a sensation of life into your walls, and make people aware of that which they’ve forgotten, because if you don’t the people in your buildings will feel nothing . //

SOURCES

- Bachelard, G., Jolas, M., Danielewski, M. Z., & Kearney, R. (2014). The Poetics of Space. New York, USA: Penguin Publishing Group.

- Hamer, A. (2018, January 31). Here’s Why Smells Trigger Such Vivid Memories. Retrieved May 16, 2019, from https://curiosity.com/topics/ heres-why-smells-trigger-such-vivid-memories-curiosity/

- Lemon, L. T., & Reis, M. J. (1965). Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Es says. Lincoln, United States of America: University of Nebraska Press.

Architecture is a form of art, and similar to all other forms of art that attempt to submerse you in their world, think of film for example, Architecture has the same ability to submerse the audience in a kind of reality that you wish to give to them. Contrasting to other artforms, Architecture is not contained within the context of a film theatre, or a museum gallery. Buildings quickly become a fabric of the day to day, within the context of the world at large. As Viktor Shklovsky so brilliantly said in his essay, Art as Technique: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” (Lemon & Reis, 1965) The challenge is therefore, much like a poet would with words, to use walls and floors to construct spaces that make your audience aware of something they would have otherwise ignored as a mundanity. The only way to do this is to analyse the world more carefully, and more weirdly.

These are all spaces, but more importantly they are spaces that contain a distinctive scent that while you might not be able to define with words, will immediately recognise should you ever come into contact with it ever again. Funnily enough these smells also seem to be relatively universal. This seems to suggest you could in fact design around this idea of smell. Weird as it may sound it would in fact be the best way to trigger an emotional response in a building’s user. Unlike tactile, visual, and audio senses, smell bypasses the normal processing units of the brain. Instead, information gets sent directly from your nose to your amygdala and hippocampus respectively responsible for handling emotion, and memory (Hamer, 2018). As such, spaces could be curated to facilitate the emotional needs of your olfactory-having visitors. Architecture is first and foremost an activity of experience design. Perhaps at first read this all seems ridiculous, though that’s partially why I’m writing it. As students of one of the best Architectural faculties in the world, we have a unique opportunity and with that, a kind of responsibility to push the boundaries of what’s possible for the world of Architecture. Especially since we are still students, every building you design can be as crazy as you want, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a total fuck up because, well, it isn’t going to be built. In that regard – why not make a crematorium that smells faintly of lavender, to invite the grieving into a more welcoming space that makes them feel at ease. It seems almost cruel to not incorporate scent and in so doing ignore the emotions of the building’s users. If you are going to use diffuse light and neutral warm colours to create an unthreatening visual landscape, why would you not also do your best to create an unthreatening olfactory landscape for the visitors? By mapping the world around you more attentively in terms of senses other than that what you merely see you can create a more authentic depiction of your subjective reality in your designs.