Wagner 014967871

UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS
MASTERS RESEARCH THESIS 2010
The Architectures of Smell

NADIA WAGNER
SUPERVISED BY PROF. DR. RICHARD GOODWIN
i. Originality Statement
I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and, to the best of my knowledge, it contains
no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of
material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any
other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis.
Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or
elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis.
I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the
extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation
and linguistic expression is acknowledged.
Signed
Date:
ii. Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Richard Goodwin

for his advice and guidance in the sourcing of material,
planning and writing of this thesis; John Lambeth for his
generosity concerning all things Smell; Dr. Adam Japser
for his tireless editing and advice; Jesse O’Neill and Joel
Mu for access to their libraries and minds. And for their
support and understanding throughout the writing of this
paper I thank the staff and students at the College of
Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, and my dear
family and friends.
iii. Definition of Terms
Aesthetics
“Aesthetics” is usually used to describe reflections on judgments of taste. Such judgments can
apply to the fine arts, nature or affects; however in colloquial use the term is most often restricted
to the fine arts. All European variations of the term are derived from the Greek aioOqiiKoq
(aisthetikos) “sensitive” or "sentient", from a(o0r|ar|-aio0avopcu (aisthese-aisthanomai) "to
perceive". That is, in its original use, the aesthetic applied to all kinds of sensations, not merely
positive ones. Taken literally, “Aesthetics” would be a science of perception.
The earliest use of aesthetics in its modern sense derives from the German asthetisch (Alexander
Baumgarten, 1750-1758), where it was used to denote perception with particular regard to the
experience of beauty in the natural world. In the late Eighteenth century it was widely used in
English in prescriptive tracts on how to achieve beauty in design and the arts. In the history of its
usage, therefore, the term “aesthetics” has undergone significant slippage in both meaning and
domain of applicability.
Architecture
1. the result or product of architectural work, as a building

2. the action or process of building; construction
3. the structure of anything
Atmosphere
1. a surrounding or pervading mood, environment, or influence

2. the dominant mood or emotional tone of a work of art, as of a play or novel
3. a distinctive quality, as of a place
Miasma
1. noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the
atmosphere
2. a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike influence or atmosphere
Smell I Odour I Fragrance I Perfume
These terms form subclasses within each other as follows:
Smell
1. to perceive the odour or scent of through the nose by means of the olfactory nerves
Odour
In this thesis the term odour is used in a neutral sense, as sometimes pleasant or sometimes
unpleasant. However it is usually linked to a definite source, such as the odour of hair, or smoke. In
this, its relationship to the word smell is like the relationship of “sound” to “noise”. An odour is a
smell with an identifiable source.
Fragrance
Fragrance is used to designate a pleasant odour, that is, an agreeable natural smell from an
identifiable source.
Perfume
The etymology of perfume is derived from the Latin per- meaning "through" and fumare "to smoke".
Since the Sixteenth century it has been used to describe fragrances designed by a perfumer. It is
in this sense—an identifiable and agreeable smell designed by human agency—that I use
“perfume” in this thesis.
Odour profile
An odour profile is used to aid classification. It divides an odourous composition into the categories
of top, middle and base note.
Notes
Septimus Piesse, in the book The Art of Perfumery and Methods of Obtaining the Odours of Plants
introduces his simple form of odour classification by mapping odour molecules on a music scale.
Although this taxonomy was never put to use, the terminology stuck and is still used by perfumers
today
Top notes
Volatile odour chemicals that take between one second and 15 minutes to evaporate and become
imperceptible to the sense of smell
Middle notes
Odour molecules that take between between 15 minutes and 12 hours to evaporate and become
imperceptible to the sense of smell
Base notes
Most tenacious odour molecules that, in the most extreme cases, can last for up to 10 years before
evaporating or becoming imperceptible to the sense of smell
15-25%
30 - 40% Middle
45 - 55%
fig. iii Diagramatic representation of the structure of a perfume’s top, middle and base notes
by Jean Carles, 1961
iv. List of Figures
Plates appear at the end of each chapter
iii. Definition of Terms
Figure iii
Diagramatic representation of the structure of a perfume’s top, middle and base notes by Jean
Carles, 1961
Source: Calkin, R. and Jellinek, J. S. Perfumery, Practices and Principles, Wiley-lnterscience,
1994, p. 88
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
The process by which olfactory information is transmitted to the brain
Source: Chiacchia, K. B., Smell, Gale Encyclopedia of Science, Gale Research, 1996, p. 3329
Figure 1.2
Plague doctor’s dress, eighteenth century France
Source: Stoddart, M. The scented ape, Cambridge University Press, p. 3
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Hans Henning’s Odour Prism, 1915-1916
Source: Wagner, N., Jasper, A., Notes on scent, Cabinet Magazine, 2009, p. 41
Figure 2.2
Michael Edwards’s Fragrance Wheel, 1983
. * Figure 2.3
Fragrance circle used by Drom, a global scent company founded in Germany in 1911
Figure 2.4
A music-inspired taxonomy of scent offered by English chemist and perfumer George William
Septimus Piesse in his seminal book The Art of Perfumery (1857)
Figure 2.5
Perfumer Paul Jellineck’s classificatory system, 1951
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Solution to Concrete project by Janet Laurence
Source: archive of project outcomes, Nadia Wagner
Figure 3.2
Solution to Concrete project by Adrian Lahoud
Figure 3.3.1
Solution to Concrete project by Anthony Browell
Figure 3.3.2
Figure 3.3.3
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Exhibition view, Edinburgh
Source: Photograph by Nadia Wagner, 2008
Figure 4.2
Poster: Why the connection stinks
Source: Porosity Studio, By the Throat, 2008, p. 31
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Installation view
Figure 5.2
Invitation
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Installation view, Thisiscurating1-40
Source: Photograph by Joel Mu, 2009
Figure 6.2
Fontana, [Center painting of triptych] Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1958-59
Source: Auping, M. Declaring Space, Prestel Verlag, p. 102
Figure 6.3
Fontana, Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1960
Source: Auping, M. Declaring Space, Prestel Verlag, p. 105
Figure 6.4
Fontana, Ambiente spaziale, 1968
Source: Photograph by Frank Kleinbach. Auping, M. Declaring Space, Prestel Verlag, p. 115
Figure 6.5
Rothko Chapel installation, Houston, Texas
Source: Photograph by Hickey Robertson, 1974. Auping, M. Declaring Space, Prestel Verlag, p.
18-19
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Interior view, Cabinet Exhibition
Figure 7.2
Interaction with the exhibition
Source: Photograph by Sina Najafi, 2009
Figure 7.3
Yves Klein Smell’s the Void (Yves Klein in his Immaterial Room, Krefeld, Germany, 1961)
Source: Courtesy of Yves Klein Archives. Auping, M. Declaring Space, Prestel Verlag, p. 161
Figure 7.4
Pierre Huyghe, A Forest of Lines, 2008
Source: http://www.bos2008.com/page/pierre huvghe archive.html. accessed 20/04/09
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
Miasma Rupture
Figure 8.2
The cholera epidemic of the nineteenth century
Source: http://historv.nih.gov/exhibits/historv/docs/index c.html. accessed 09/01/2010
Figure 8.3
Philip Johnson’s Glass House
Source: Photograph by Norman McGrath. Klein, L. History, Autobiography, and Interpretation: The
Challenge of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, Future Anterior, Volume 1, Number 2, University of
Minnesota Press, p. 58
. Figure 8.4
Printed scent strip
Source: Otero-Pailos, J. An Olfactory reconstruction of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, AA Files,
Issue 57, The Architectural Association, p. 40
Figure 8.5
Andy Warhol lights up a cigarette during a visit to Philip Johnson’s Glass House in 1965
Source: Photograph by David McCabe. Otero-Pailos, J. An Olfactory reconstruction of Philip
Johnson’s Glass House, AA Files, Issue 57, The Architectural Association, p. 43
Figure 8.6
Philip Johnson’s Guest House,
Source: Jenkins, S. and Mohney, D. The Houses of Philip Johnson, Abbeville Publishers, p. 91
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1
How to smell, step one
Source: drawing by Aldous Massie, 2009
Figure 9.2
How to smell, step two
Figure 9.3
How to smell, step three
Figure 9.4
How to smell, step four
Figure 9.5
The internal and external senses, from a thirteenth-century English manuscript [...]
Source: Woolgar, C.M. The Senses in Late Medieval England, Yale Universiy Press, p. 20
Figure 9.6
Longthorpe Tower, near Peterborough: the wheel of the senses
Source: Photograph by Woolgar, C.M. The Senses in Late Medieval England, Yale Universiy
Press, p. 27
Figure 9.7
Projection of the plan of the Temple of Luxor on a human skeleton
Source: Schwaller de Lubicz, R.A. The Temple in Man, Autumn Press, p. 23
Figure 9.8
The 100-story building, detail of nine revolutionary “temperature and atmosphere regulating
tubes” [...]
Source: Koolhaas, R. Delirious New York, The Monacelli Press, p. 90
v. Abstract
In spite of the scale of the flavors and fragrance industries, the importance of air conditioning to
contemporary dwellings, or the growth in discussion of ‘atmosphere’ amongst architects, the topic
of smell remains exotic This is not merely a product of indifference in the professions. Rather,
smell presents intractable difficulties for communication, curation and architectural design. Some of
these problems are inherent and physiological, others are cultural and historical.
This thesis provides an introduction to the appropriate conceptualization, presentation and

representation of smells. Smells are considered in terms of the problems attached to their
description, the way in which they affect the experience of time, and their relation to both interior
and exterior architecture. This thesis is project based and design driven, therefore much of the
research is explained in terms of case studies. As part of these considerations, strategies for the
use of smell in exhibition design and architecture are discussed, and finally some new avenues for
experimentation are proposed.
vi. Annotated Contents
1. Introduction
1 0 1 Introduction and intent
1.1.0 Explanation of thesis title and project components
1.2.0 Some contemporary theories of atmosphere
1.2.1 Bohme understands atmosphere in relation to how we perceive architecture
1.2.2 Sloterdijk understands atmosphere in relation to culture
1.2.3 Brian O’Doherty understands atmosphere in relation to contemporary art
1.3.0 Methodology and chapter outline
1.4.0 A brief scientific history of smell
1.5.0 A brief social history of smell
2. The trouble with Names (including some failed taxonomies)
2.1.0 Summary of conventional beliefs regarding the difficulty of describing smell
2.2.0 Reformulation of description problem using Trygg Engen
2.3.0 The trouble with Names, a study by l/KS. Brud
< - 2.4.0 Discussion of failed historical taxonomies
2.5.0 Conclusion
3. Concrete (description)
3.1.0 Explanation of project, letter and formulation of concrete odour
3.2.0 Confirmation of hypothesis
3.3.0 Conclusion
4. Edinburgh (time)
4.1.0 Introduction to the Project
4.2.0 By the Throat
4.3.0 Solution to brief
4.4.0 Phenomenological Discussion (experience of time through smell)
4.5.0 Conclusion
5. Louvres (movement)
5.1.0 Urban Olfactics 1A/1B
5.2.0 Reflection and Development
5.3.0 Kant on form (Critique of Judgment)
6. Thisiscurating1-40 (art)
6.1.0 Description of exhibition
6.2.0 Reflections on Exhibition: Art as Interpretive Frame
7. Cabinet (interiors)
7.1.0 Description of Exhibition
7.2.0 History of Oak Moss and Evernyl
7.3.0 Reflection on Exhibition
7.4.0 Pierre Huyghe (description of exhibition)
7.4.1 Rainforest Scent (suggestion)
7.5.0 Gernot Bohme and Henri Lefebvre on Atmosphere
8. Miasma (architecture)
8.1.0 Introduction
8.1.1 Miasmas in the 18th and 19th Centuries
8.1.2 Description of Miasmic Ruptures
8.2.0 The smell of Philip Johnson’s Glass House
8.3.0 Conclusion. Mould: Space, Time, Decay
9. Appendices
9.1.0 How to smell (smelling strips)
10. Bibliography
1. Introduction
We see only when there is light enough, taste only when we put things into our mouths,
touch only when we make contact with someone or something, hear only sounds that are
loud enough But we smell always and with every breath.
(Ackerman 1990 p. 6)
1.0.1 Introduction and intent
The Artists of today are busily looking for something that will once again interest the
people of today, distracted as they are by a multitude of visual stimuli all clamouring for
their attention.
(Munari 1970 p. 12)
Bruno Munari’s quote in Design as Art suggests the search for a creative tool that can be used to
circumvent the defenses of overstimulated consumers. With the rampant proliferation of visual
stimuli continuing today, the quote is still relevant. This thesis however, is not concerned with
helping the designer to reveal yet another trend or trick. Rather, it hopes to incite the creative
profession to consider how smell may be used as an exploratory tool, as a process, one that can
be used for thinking rather than marketing.
Since the Enlightenment, smell has been placed relatively low in the hierarchy of the senses. The
physiological nature of smell seems not to have been held in its favour, even though, as an internal
sense, it is closer to us than sight. Immanuel Kant, in his Reflexionen zurAnthropologie, makes a
curious distinction between the senses by which we as rational beings come to know things, and
the senses that work on a more intuitive basis. Looking at things, hearing them, and even touching
them require Wahrnehmung, or perception. But smelling things, like eating them, involves a sort of
carnal knowledge, Einnehmung, or ingestion. By smelling things, we absorb them directly into our
bodies, which allows us to draw the surprising conclusion that the sense of smell provides what
Kant otherwise only attributes to God: unmediated knowledge of the thing in itself.
i This thesis endeavors to explain smell as, at least, an equal to all other senses when it comes to
communication (and therefore design). It will do this mainly in reference to smell’s privileged
access to two of the main human faculties that design tries to wake: memory and emotion.
1.1.0 Explanation of thesis title and project components
“The Architecture of Smell” designates two things:
1. the structures of smell, considered in terms of smell’s physiology, psychology and philosophy.
2. the role of smell in architectural design.
The title of the thesis can therefore be read either way, as “the architecture of smell” (taxonomic
form) or “the smell of architecture” (smell’s direct influence on built form). Both themes are
addressed. This thesis is both a reference for designers and a compilation of projects that have
employed smell as a primary design tool. This thesis is explicitly practice based, and as a result the
progression of chapters has been determined by my completed projects.
1.1.1 The project component consists of a reference library that contains 300 odours. The odours
are alphabetically arranged (as is common practice among perfumers), and help ‘illustrate’ both
the projects and taxonomies that have been outlined in this paper.
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1.2.0 Some contemporary theories of atmosphere
This thesis builds upon the popularity of writings on ‘atmosphere’ in recent years. The three
theorists referred to at length below, Gernot Bohme, Peter Sloterdijk and Brian O’Doherty, refer to
atmosphere in terms of architecture, cultural theory and art respectively. All of their arguments
require a radical re-evaluation of atmosphere. The arguments in this thesis build upon their work,
read and interpreted in terms of how smell contributes to atmospheric perception.
1.2.1 Bohme understands atmosphere in relation to how we perceive architecture
In Atmosphere as the subject matter of Architecture, published in Herzog and de Meuron’s book
Natural Histories, the contemporary German philosopher Gernot Bohme1 does not mention smell
directly, but talks about the importance of architecture being intuitively felt rather than seen. He
agrees that the visual representation of architecture is important due to distribution: magazine
images, presentation images, marketing images, that can all, very easily, be transported around
the world for masses to see. At the same time, he questions “but, then, is seeing really the truest
means of perceiving architecture? Do we not feel it even more? And what does architecture
actually shape—matter or should we say space?” (Gernot Bohme in Ursprung 2002 p. 399)
Bohme argues rather that “Space is genuinely experienced by being in it, through physical
presence.” (p. 402), an argument that comes very close to Berger’s description of ‘aura’ in Ways of
Seeing, first published in 1972. Berger argues that a painting in its original context, viewed in-situ,
surrounded by its original atmosphere, can be understood more fully:
Originally paintings were an integral part of the building for which they were designed.
Sometimes in an early Renaissance church or chapel one has the feeling that the images
on the wall are records of the building’s interior life, that together they make up the
building’s memory - so much are they part of the particularity of the building.
(Berger 2008 p. 12)
Smell, for its part, is usually considered indivisible from aura or atmosphere, but due to advances
« in chemical synthesis, we can now ask the same questions of smell that Berger asks of the visual
arts. Is a smell presented as a replica, without its original context, comprehensible? Is it lacking
something? What does it contribute to the new space in which it is presented?
It is important to test these questions; and part of this thesis involves smell taken outside of its
original context. As Berger would argue, the way in which we appreciate the images in the
Renaissance church is modified because we have experienced their inverted aura on the printed
page (situated amongst advertising copy, for instance). The aura of the paintings in-situ of the
church is now heightened because we have experienced the antithetical option. Smell, even more
so than architecture, can only be experienced in-situ. Smell relies on its surroundings in order to
create a mood and in turn store an emotional memory—hence the close link between atmosphere
and mood:
But seeing itself is not a sense that defines being-in-something but rather a sense that
establishes difference and creates distance. There is another sense specifically for being-
in-something; it is a sense that might be called ‘mood’.
(Gernot Bohme in Ursprung 2002 p. 402)
1 Gernot Bohme (professor of Philosophy at the University of Darmstadt, Germany) has published numerous
books on architecture, aesthetics and atmosphere.
15
1.2.2 Sloterdijk understands atmosphere in relation to culture
Another contemporary German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, has taken Bohme’s observations on
the importance of atmosphere to an even further extreme, arguing that “air conditioning”, the
technical and social modification of physical atmospheres, is decisive in the transformation of
humans over the course of the 20th century.2
With the passing of the 20th century, the theory of homo sapiens qua pupils of the air
ultimately also acquires pragmatic contours. We begin to understand that man is not only
what he eats, but what he breathes and that in which he is immersed. Cultures are
collective conditions of immersion in air and sign systems.
(Sloterdijk 2009 p. 84)
Sloterdijk takes the question of atmosphere beyond one of architecture, to encompass all
technical, social and symbolic interactions—in short, culture. By arguing that atmosphere is
culture, and culture is atmosphere, Sloterdijk implies that the contemporary theorist is obliged to
begin with the way in which physical atmospheres can be modified before moving on to more
abstract arguments.
With the transition from the 20th century to the 21st, the subject of the cultural sciences
thus becomes:: making the air conditions explicit. These sciences practice pneumatology
with an empirical disposition. For the now, this program can only be carried out by
reconstruction and accumulation because the ‘‘thing itself”, the universe of influenced
climata, of deigned atmospheres, of modified airs and of adjusted, measured, legalized
environments, has-with the very far-reaching advances in the explication of natural
scientific, technical, military, legislative legal, architectonic and artistic spheres-gained an
almost unbeatable head start over the attempt to formulate concepts in cultural theory.
(Sloterdijk 2009 pp. 84-85)
This argument culminates in Sloterdijk maintaining that once we have learnt how to diagnose the
transformation of atmospheres by culture, we should actively continue this process of
„ transformation as designers. And as Sloterdijk places atmosphere before architecture, he implicitly
places the perfumer before the architect.
Air-design is the technological response to the phenomenological insight that human

being-in-the-world is always and without exception present as a modification of “being-in-
the-air. ” Since there is always something in the air, advances in atmosphere explication
throw up the idea that, by way of precaution, we might put something in it ourselves.
(Sloterdijk 2009 p. 93)
1.2.3 Brian O’Doherty understands atmosphere in relation to contemporary art
Moving from the cathedral to the contemporary gallery: O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube was
first published in 1976 as a series of essays in Artforum, and since then has had a significant
impact on both the practice and the self understanding of curating.
No longer confined to a zone around the artwork, and impregnated now with the memory
of art, the new space [the unbiased, white interior of the gallery] pushed gently against its
confining box. Gradually, the gallery was infiltrated with consciousness. Its walls became
ground, its floor pedestal, its corners vortices, its ceilings a frozen sky. The white cube
became art-in-potency, its enclosed space an alchemical medium.
(O’Doherty 1999 p. 87)
2 Lee Kuan Yew, president of Singapore for many decades, was once asked what he thought the most
important invention of the twentieth century was in an interview. ‘Air conditioning’, he responded, ‘because it
brought civilization to Singapore...’
16
Whereas Catholic religious spaces are festooned with imagery, the gallery space is presented in
iconoclastic white. The artist, who now communicates concepts as much as images, requires a
field that allows anything to work within it, and that is both neutral and supportive; a space that
says nothing, but at the same time promises to be forward-looking. The gallery as cube-painted-
white was the perfect solution. Why this environment lends itself so perfectly, not only to the
display of paintings, but also to the presentation of smell is discussed in Chapter 6,
Thisiscurating 1 -40.
1.3.0 Methodology and chapter outline
This thesis makes suggestions through various projects that have been tested as exhibitions both
locally and internationally. It comes in eight parts:
The first three chapters centre on smell considered as a problem of communication. Chapter 2:
Naming introduces the difficulty smell poses for description and the taxonomies that have been
developed to (inconclusively) address this. Chapter 3: Concrete explores how designers and artists
represent smell via visual cues. Chapter 4: Edinburgh employs smell as a tool for direct
communication—smell as a signal, that communicates through memory.
Chapter 5: Louvres is the first instance that smell is studied within the framework of architecture.
This is explored through the smell representation of movement of a single architectural element—
the louvre, the aperture made of thin overlapping boards that is traditionally used to allow smoke to
escape and prevent rain from entering.
Therefore Chapters 1-5 are to be read as foundations on which Chapters and Projects 6-8 are
built.
Chapter 6: Thisiscurating1-40 and Chapter 7: Cabinet situate smell explicitly in interior space.
These two chapters introduce notions of atmosphere, and provide the opportunity to consider
various Twentieth century theorists. Thisiscurating 1-40 looks at smell as art in the gallery space
, with reference to Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube, as well as the history of performance
art and Futurism. Cabinet centers around an exhibition held in 2009, and explains smell as an
interior condition —how (invisible) smell forms and deforms space with reference to the theorists
Gernot Bohme and Peter Sloterdijk.
Lastly, Chapter 8: Miasma explores the direct influence of odour taboos on built form. It argues this
by referencing historic texts that explore sanitary reform from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries.
1.4.0 A brief scientific history of smell
Greek philosopher Democritus of Abdera (460-360 B.C) understood that “...the smell of an object
is due to volatile, or easily evaporated, molecules that emanate from it.” (Chiacchia 1996 p. 3328).
Theophrastus (c. 371 - c. 287 BC) also wrote on the senses before Aristotle, and is one of the
chief ancient sources on physiological psychology. In De Sensibus, he rejects the theory that
sensations are produced by material emanations that penetrate the pores of sense organs, for if
this was the case, “those substances with the strongest odour would most rapidly perish. Now the
fact is nearly the reverse: the most fragrant plants and other bodies that are most odorous are the
most enduring” (Stratton 1964 p. 36-37) Smell, therefore, must be mediated, and not the result of
direct contact with an object. It does, however, result from changes in a body when it either
improves or deteriorates. It is a sign of mixture, change, adulteration, growth and decay. Today we
know only slightly more:
17
1.4.1 Smell is processed by approximately ten million olfactory receptor neurons in the nose.
These olfactory receptor neurons have the ability to regenerate on a regular basis.3 This capacity
for neuronal re-growth is unique to smell, and not found in any of the other senses.
1.4.2 Roughly three per cent of the human genome is devoted to the olfactory system. This is
significantly more than is devoted to any other sensory system. It is commonly estimated that we
can smell roughly 10,000 distinct scents, but no one has made a definitive claim regarding the
number of smells an individual can differentiate. Unlike hearing and sight, whose mechanics and
molecular biology have been exhaustively mapped in the course of the twentieth century, there is
little agreement on how smell works and it is still somewhat unclear wether smell is discerned by
molecular shape or, like sight and hearing, molecular vibration. (Wagner 2009)
1.4.3 Although the standard hypothesis of olfactory perception is now based on what is commonly
called the “shape theory” (a “lock and key” ligand-binding mechanism by which most chemical
signaling within the brain takes place4), Luca Turin (2006) —a research biologist and well-known
perfume reviewer—resurrected an exotic theory that had first been mooted and dismissed in the
1950s. It suggested that the smell of a compound does not depend on the shape of the molecule.
Turin argued that embedded in the cell membrane is a kind of electron-tunneling spectroscope5,
and that the smell of a molecule is dependent upon its chief vibrational resonance.
1.4.4 Figure 1.1 shows how breathing, chewing and swallowing can all lead to odour molecules
being transported to the olfactory bulb. Also shown in the diagram is the olfactory bulb’s direct
connection to the centre of the brain. These pathways determine the mechanical position of smell
within consciousness.
In the five seconds it takes us to breathe, smells are transformed into memories and
feelings by a sophisticated chemical sensing system... [known as] the limbic system, the
part of the brain that governs emotional responses and affects memory.
(Scanlan 2003)
The olfactory epithelium is where odours are processed (see circled section in Figure 1.1), after
« which messages are sent to the olfactory cortex via the olfactory nerve where memory and
emotion are coordinated with the sense of smell (Chiacchia 1996 pp. 3328-3329). This direct
connection allows the sense of smell to have closer associations with memories and emotions than
any other sense; it has been noted in the scientific literature that people with severe memory
disorders—Alzheimer’s patients in particular—have massively reduced sensitivity to smell. The
ability to recognize common smells is now used as a diagnostic tool in identifying neuro-
degenerative diseases (Kovacs 2003)
1.4.5 As for emotions and the limbic system, Stoddart adds:
It is now agreed that the limbic system is heavily committed in the expression of emotion,
although whether it generates emotion or merely integrates it, is not clear.
(Stoddart 1990 p. 132)
The ambivalence between the “generating” and the “integrating” of emotions in the quote above
exposes the difficulty that neurological researchers have in quantifying emotions. The limits to the
neurologist's ability to predict or describe the emotions restricts the application of empirical
research to the themes of this thesis. Although some understanding of contemporary neuro
physiology is important, a dependence upon it would lead to a form of storytelling, in which every
3 Linda Buck and Richard Axel won a Nobel Prize for this amongst other discoveries on smell in 2004
4 the immune system similarly functions via a lock and key ligand-binding mechanism
5 A spectroscope is an instrument used for marking wavelengths

18
observed phenomena in olfaction would have an imaginary neurological explanation attached to it,
one that is not capable of being proved false. For this reason, contemporary neurology is only
sparingly used in this thesis.
1.5.0 A brief social history of smell
[...] odours were once too fundamental to our well-being for their relegation to hedonism.
(Van Toller & Dodd 1988 p. 16)
1.5.1 The ability of fragrances to heighten experience have been celebrated since antiquity.
Romans used perfumes to symbolically bind the audience to each other, and ancient banquets
traditionally featured fragrances as a conscious element. Lucretius and Pliny attest to saffron and
other scents being indispensable to public events (Bally 1910 p. 79). And as the contemporary
researchers into the history of aroma, Classen, Howes and Synnot note:
Putting on a good show in antiquity [...] involved putting on a good scent. The spicy, sweet
scents offered to the spectators at such events would not only serve to please and excite
them, but would help make them feel involved in the activities in a way that a purely visual
display could not. Not only would the spectators see and greet the pageantry, they would
breathe it in and feel identified with it and each other.
(Classen, Howes etal. 1994 pp. 26-27)
This fragrant sociality was not merely a hedonistic or secular one, but was also central to religious
practice, bringing an invisible element to spiritual activities. Fragrance was occasionally mixed right
into the mortar of temples:
At Elius there is a temple of Minerva in which, it is said, Panaenus, the brother of

Pheidias, applied plaster that had been worked with milk and saffron. The result is that
even today, if one wets one’s thumb with saliva and rubs it on the plaster, the latter still
gives off the smell and taste of saffron.
(Pliny, Natural History, vol. 10, bk. 13)
Saffron was a sacred scent in Roman times, just as frankincense was later used to purify church
and congregation.
...the classical deities were frequently deemed to make their presence known through
fragrance [...] A mystical fragrance, similarly, was thought by the Christians to signal the
presence of the Holy Spirit.
(Classen, Howes et al. 1994 p. 52)
1.5.2 Fragrance was not only an indicator of the presence of the holy spirit, it was also a portent of
divine order. As Peter Harrison argues in The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science
(Harrison 1998 p. i), this kind of relationship to smell stands in sharp contrast to the later position of
enlightenment science, in w hich smell, in the sense of stench, was often relegated to being merely
a sign of disease.
1.5.3 Romans and Greeks also washed and anointed the dead with perfumes, much as the Bible
claims was undertaken on the body of Christ (Matthew 28:1-20). As part of the world beyond
vision, Smell has long been connected with the world beyond the beyond:
Thus sweetened, tihe [Egyptian] deceased could enter into an olfactory dialogue with the
gods and request entry into their company
19
...the practice of cremation could be described as a process of purification, whereby the
[Roman] dead were released from their material bodies and transformed into pure
essence, ready for their new ethereal existence in the afterlife
1.5.4 Our sense of smell is beyond doubt central to religious, ritual and social history. Strange,
then, that in the history of Western philosophy it should be so little discussed, and so often
dismissed as subjective. Smell has been held in low esteem since the height of the Enlightenment.
Whereas sight is dependent upon light and linked to rationality, and furthermore allowed the
educated to read, smell, in contrast, was barbaric. Its only known purpose was as sexual
enticement.6 When Condillac, in his Treatise on the Sensations (1754), imagined a statue that
would be granted all the capacities of thinking and feeling one by one, smell was the first capability
he bestowed upon it, because he held smell to be the most primitive of senses and the one that
contributes least to the mind. Condillac maintained that, should his statue smell a rose, it would not
thereby gain any concept of the rose as an entity distinct from itself. When it smells a rose, it
simply exists within the sensation of the scent of a rose. Smell, this position implies, teaches us
nothing about the outside world, but produces pleasant or unpleasant sensations that go on to
determine what we desire, rather than what we know.
1.5.5 This demotion of smell has continued more or less uninterrupted, as demonstrated by the
manner in which Septimus Piesse attempted to defend the utility of perfumes in his 1857 book The
Art of Perfumery and Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants:
Of the five senses, that of smelling is the least valued, and, as a consequence, is the least
tutored; but we must not conclude from this, our own act, that it is of insignificant
importance to our welfare and happiness. By neglecting to tutor the olfactory nerve, we
are constantly led to breathe impure air, and thus poison the body by neglecting the
warning given at the gate of the lungs. Persons who use perfumes are more sensitive to
the presence of a vitiated atmosphere than those who consider the faculty of smelling as
an almost useless gift.
(Piesse 1857 p. xi)
Piesse is here referring to the commonly held view that one could be directly poisoned by foul
smelling air: “In the medical theory and natural philosophies of the time, stench was equated with
disease” (Cowan, Steward, et al. 2007 p. 25). A correlate of this assumption was the belief that
pleasant smells had a beneficial medical effect.7 As a result, ambergris was used as an ingredient
in a 'very good perfume' (Cowan 2007 p. 35) to ward off plague. As late as the early 19th century,
doctors would still wear beaks of herbs and other fragrant materials to fight disease, (Stoddart
1990 p. 3) see figure 1.2.
An understanding of how smell was perceived before Pasteur's discoveries in the mid 1800s
allows us to draw direct connections between smell and it's influence on built form. It was not until
the 1860s that Pasteur’s discovery that disease was linked to airborne pathogens rather than to
smell directly led to a re-evaluation of the dangers implicit in smelling. Even then, smell was
associated with moral turpitude.
Odours thus mingled indiscriminately in the crowded homes of the poor, increasing the
revulsion felt towards them by the sensitized bourgeoisie, who had come to associate
olfactory promiscuity with moral promiscuity.
(Classen, Howes et al. p. 82)
6 See also Toller & Dodd (1988); Stoddart (1990)
7 A belief that continues on to the present day in the form of “aromatherapy”

20
The same reversal of cause and effect that lead scent to be considered an active cause of disease
provided the motivation for the perfuming of body odour with musk—the warm, animalic smelling
excretion from the anal glands of the musk deer.8 If moral laxity and certain smells were
associated, then certain smells could bring about the relaxation of morals.
1.5.5.1 There is another possible reason for smell’s downfall in the senses hierarchy. In
Civilization and its Discontents, Freud tells an originary myth in which Man goes from walking on
all fours to standing erect. As he does so, the genitals are exposed, the sense of sight is privileged,
and the sense of smell is denigrated. Whether or not the story refers to an actual historical event
doesn’t matter, Freud’s point is that somewhere in our development, we learn shame for what has
become the spectacle of shit and lose the capacity to smell it with any finesse.
1.5.6 The link between smell and architecture is not a trivial one. Rather—as the last chapter in
this thesis, Miasma, will show—smell is arguably the sense which has shaped our way of building
most intimately.
This revolution in civic cleanliness was accompanied by a revolution in personal

cleanliness. Baths, for instance, had reappeared in Europe in the eighteenth century.
(Classen, Howes et at. p. 81)
As early as 1844, one of the greatest sanitory reformers of the day, Dr. Michel Levy,
warned of the harmful effects of “the family atmosphere” and “the gaseous detritus of the
family.” “The family atmosphere”synthesized the individual atmospheres in the dwelling in
the same way that the atmosphere of the city represented the sum of social emanations.
(Corbin 1986 p. 163)
If we accept that the senses and culture are intertwined, then the dependence of architecture upon
smell, and the urgency of establishing a design methodology to deal with this interdependence,
become clear. This thesis is also a manifesto, a first step in the development of such a
methodology. As such, it is a beginning, and requires further projects in order to be made
complete.
8 Real musk is obtained from the dried gland of a wild male deer, and fresh from the wild it has a repulsive
smell. Harvesting musk involves hanging out in forests during mating season with a high-powered rifle,
shooting a medium-large mammal, cutting out a small gland, and then taking and preparing that gland for a
luxury product. Hunters can’t tell whether the deer in their sights is a buck or a doe, and consequently half of
the animals they shoot are the wrong sex. That’s one reason for synthetic musks. Another is that real musk
is a melange of chemicals that will cause some wearers to break out in hives. The first synthetic variant—
Musk Xylol— was produced in 1888, and as the industry bible by Steffen Arctander notes, it is a close
relative of trinitrotoluene, or TNT. Attempts to synthesize Musk Xylol in commercial quantities have been
responsible for serious explosions in fragrance laboratories, and the death of more than a few fragrancers.
(Wagner and Jasper 2009)
21
fig. 1.1 The process by which olfactory information is
transmitted to the brain
lilaLi^ ^rjMedtciru, et eittfrtj vrrjomu
<ftit Vintent let Pettier* t,<Jl est oc
tnamquin it le.uant.it ituutjit* akj'ietir
I ‘it '■lijiaUt t<« iotig neyrt-i-tp/t or p/rjmns
Jig. 1.2 Plague doctor's dress, eighteenth century France

2. The trouble with Names (including some failed taxonomies)
What was wanting in pagan philosophy was a science of interpretation, a hermeneutical

method by which natural things could he made to yield up their secret meanings
(Harrison 1998 p. 15)
2.1.0 Summary of conventional beliefs regarding the difficulty of describing smell
The view that smell is subjective is extremely common, and can be traced back to the prejudices
entertained by Enlightenment philosophers who, in their attempts to disprove superstitious beliefs,
resisted interpretations of the natural world that they could not find objective (usually visual)
evidence for.
Condillac argued as early as 1754, in his Treatise on the Sensations, that smell offers nothing that
could be considered an object of contemplation but only produces pleasure or displeasure. This
view was carried over into the Nineteenth century, and can be found clearly expressed in 1837 with
the work of Bernard Bolzano:
You can’t have the same experience twice, nor can two people, who smell the same rose
at the same time, have exactly the same experience of that smell (although they will be
quite alike). So each single sensation causes a single (new) unique and simple idea with a
particular change as its object. Now, this idea in your mind is a subjective idea.
(Wissenschaftslehre §72)
In contemporary terms, it is widely assumed that it is impossible to know if two people who smell
the same odour have the same sensory experience. Even within the perfume profession, this view
is rarely challenged; perhaps because the confusion only adds to the mystique of their trade.
2.1.1 Architects Herzog & de Meuron, in an interview published in part in their book Natural
History, give us another way to understand smell as subjective as they talk about their long held
. * fascination with the creation of their own perfume:
The really interesting thing about perfumes is not actually the scent itself, but rather the
memory that is stored with the scent. Smells and scents can evoke experiences and
images of the past, almost like photographs. For us certain smells always produce
architectural images and spatial memories—almost like an inner film. [...] We can certainly
design better or poorer, more pleasant or less pleasant architecture, but like perfume, it is
the experience associated—or not associated—with it that is decisive. There is a
difference between experiencing a victory or a defeat in a football stadium. Memories and
experiences are always individual. This element of the elusive emotions that define the
aura of a place plays a role in our perception of architecture.
(Ursprung 2002 pp. 364-365)
2.1.2 The chief evidence for the assumption that smell is subjective are descriptions of smells
themselves. Such descriptions tend to be either extremely vague, or rather poetic and oblique.
Each smell brings up its own personal associations and memories, but very rarely a lucid or
determinate description. Because smells are not communicable, it is then inferred that they are
subjective. To properly approach the perception of smell, it is necessary to separate the problem of
the description of smells from the doctrine of smell’s subjectivity.
2.1.3 Kant writes in Reflexionen zurAnthropologie, “all the senses have their own descriptive
vocabularies, e.g. for sight, there is red, green, and yellow, and for taste there is sweet and sour,
etc. But the sense of smell can have no descriptive vocabulary of its own. Rather, we borrow our
adjectives from the other senses, so that it smells sour, or has a smell like roses or cloves or musk.
22
They are all, however, terms drawn from other senses. Consequently, we cannot describe our
sense of smell.”9
2.1.4 Kant’s observation does not seem to be a limitation of his Baltic Sea dialect. There are also
no words in the English language that are exclusively devoted to describing a smell. All the other
senses have a specific vocabulary that is part of everyday speech and in no way technical (bright,
loud, hard, soft, smooth, bitter, etc). Smell proceeds entirely via euphemism. Typical words for
describing citrus scents include fruity, refreshing, sweet, sharp. “Fruity” is derived from a noun.
“Refreshing” is stolen from an affect. “Sweet” belongs to taste. “Sharp” to touch. The word citrus is
useless for anyone who has not smelt citrus before, and none of the descriptive words belong to
the sense of smell except in a metaphorical sense.
2.2.0 Reformulation of description problem using Trygg Engen
The most insightful psychological research into the problems posed by describing smells was
performed by Trygg Engen in the 1970s. Engen notes that “the linking of odors and names is
inherently weak” (Engen 1987 p. 498). Engen conducted studies that showed that not only is the
strength of association from odour to name very weak, but that our descriptions of smells are
extremely suggestible. Once a subject has been primed to expect a specific odour, their
expectations will largely control how they interpret the sensation. Therefore, a test subject
presented with the fragrance of raspberry, will, if they are shown a picture of strawberries, almost
inevitably prefer the evidence of their eyes over the evidence of their nose, “manufacturers of
synthetic flavors benefit from this, because one is likely to perceive the odor of a product as
matching its label for example, strawberry, even though it is in fact a poor approximation of the real
thing” (Engen 1987 p. 501).
2.3.0 The trouble with Names, a study by WS. Brud
In the mid 1980s, Dr. Wladyslaw S. Brud10 devised a new set of odour profiles and presented these
at the International Perfumery Congress, 1986. The odour descriptors he presented were the result
of a survey conducted with the aim of making communication between perfumers more “practical”.
* He found that fragrance manufacturers were “elegant and convincing” in their descriptions, but
“misleading and ambiguous” at the same time (Brud 1986 p. 27). So, taking 200 manufacturers
leaflets and selecting the words which were most often used to describe specific aroma chemicals,
he arranged a survey and sent it to perfumers of leading fragrance houses in order to gain an
understanding of the language being used by those in charge.
Brud encountered a range of interesting problems, one of which was that “quite a number of
respondents are used to writing top secret formulas so nobody can read them” (Brud 1986 p. 31),
which is a problem specific to the sense of smell because its language is not shared.
2.3.1 What is curious about the findings of Brud are that even the most highly trained professional
perfumers will assign individual odour chemicals with varying descriptors.
In the most standard category “Floral” for example, twenty-two perfumers listed Rose oil as the
defining odour. Another sixteen perfumers agreed on Jasmin absolute; whereas three perfumers
choose Geranium oil which, in turn, was used further on in the study by one perfumer to describe
the category “Earthy”.
9 own translation.
10 Dr. W.S. Brud is President of the Management Board at Pollena-Aroma, Poland’s largest perfume
compound manufacturing company
23
Fifteen perfumers listed “no answer” under the category “Spicy-Balsamic”; twenty-three thought
Styrax resin was the best odour descriptor. Another twenty-three perfumers gave twenty-three
varying odour chemicals which included Patchouly oil,11 Thyme oil,:2 and Vetiver oif3
2.3.2 Brud doesn’t automatically agree with the odour chemicals put forward by the majority of
perfumers. In the concluding comments to category “Green” he says:
At first glance, Gal ban urn chosen by 1/3 of the respondents seems the best standard for
green odour. However, study of other terms and the wide range of qualities of this product
change that clear picture. Gal ban urn for some people is earthy, herbal or earthy-fungoid
[...] Therefore, in my opinion, the best solution is to agree with the twenty-seven perfumers
who chose cis-3-hexen-2-ol as green odour standard.
(Brud 1986 p. 31)
Brud further justifies this selection by explaining that cis-3-hexen-2-ol is a synthetic odour molecule
and therefore more consistent than the alternative Galbanum which is a chemical of natural origin
and so differs in odour quality depending on its source and method of preparation.
Needless to say the naming of odours is confusing and relies on many factors; interestingly these
problems are also experienced among industry specialists.
2.4.0 Discussion of failed historical taxonomies
Objects in the physical world were like the words of an inchoate language. The references
of these objects were provided by scripture or exegetical convention, but ‘syntactic’ rules
governing the relations between the objects themselves were completely absent. [...] Not
until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the symbols which constituted the physical
world invested with their own syntax. Only then, could there be a book of nature.
(Harrison 1998 p. 33)
The puzzle presented by our inability to communicate smell has lead to a wealth of classification
. systems, the very profusion of which attests to their failure to be conclusive. As Engen writes “in no
other [sense] modality has classification dominated research as it has in the case of the sense of
smell” (Engen 1982 p. 7). The ideal aimed at is a kind of spectrum whereby all of the tens of
thousands of possible smell stimuli (known and unknown) could be related and compared to each
other. The success of the colour wheel in achieving this leads to many of the classification systems
being presented as a closed circle in which scents are related. These spectral models are,
however, deceptive, and can only be made by ingeniously folding and tearing the range of lived
experience in order to fit a prescribed model. All of them, on closer examination, reveal hidden
discontinuities or concealed alternative branches of sensations (see figures 2.2, 2.3).
More complex three dimensional models, such as the Henning Odour prism (figure 2.1), are
significantly more persuasive. However even here strong supporting evidence is lacking. More
recent researchers, overwhelmed by their own data, continue to assert that the spectrum of smell
exists, but that it requires a kind of n-dimensional space in which to represent it (Zarzo & Stanton
2009). Consistent or not, at this level of complexity, the attempt to define a visual classification
system for smell loses its relevance for designers.
11 Patchouli oil was also listed in Brud’s study as a descriptor by seventeen perfumers for the category
“Woody”; by two perfumers under “Amber-Woody”; and by twenty-two perfumers under “Earthy”
12 Thyme oil was also listed as a descriptor by five perfumers under the category “Herbal”; by one perfumer
under “Spicy”; and one other perfumer under “Fungoid”.
13 Vetiver oil was listed as a descriptor by fourteen perfumers for the category “Woody”; by one perfumer
under “Amber-Woody”; by eighteen perfumers under “Earthy”; and by one perfumer under “Earthy-Fungoid”.
24
Classification by category betrays many of the same problems: each revision merely results in an
increase in complexity: Aristotle (384-322 B.C) classified smells into five categories; the odour
classification system by Linnaeus14 (1756) contained seven categories. By the late nineteenth
century Dutch physiologist Hendrik Zwaardemaker15 (1895) had nine. Georges Gerbelaud’s
system from the 1950s encompassed fortyfive categories, and a decade later Steffen Arctander
included eighty-eight separate groups (for a complete summary of taxonomies see Wagner 2009).
Even more striking than the increasing complexity of the proposed systems is the parallel
proliferation in the taxonomies themselves. I will enumerate a few.
2.4.1 Crocker and Henderson’s 1927 model derives many of its terms from Zwaardemaker’s model
of 1895, which itself draws from Linnaeus’s original taxonomy of 1756. According to Crocker and
Henderson’s scheme, each odour can be considered in terms of the extent to which it is fragrant,
acid, burnt, or caprylic, each on a scale of 1 to 8. Thus, vanillin has an odour of 7122.
Unfortunately, there is often disagreement as to the precise score to give a scent on each of its
characteristics, although Crocker and Henderson do attempt to provide a structured language for
comparing scents.
2.4.2 Some industrial scent manufacturers arrange smells into a “color wheel”. Often these
fragrance wheels are not designed as an objective tool for perfumers, but rather as a marketing
guide for clients. The Michael Edwards fragrance wheel (figure 2.2) is one such example, designed
in 1983. Problems arise as smells, unlike colors, do not naturally form a continuous spectrum. The
Drom spectral wheel (figure 2.3), for instance, implausibly places citrus directly next to musk, but
spatially opposite to “fruity” scents.
2.4.4 In the nineteenth century, Septimus Piesse arranged smell on a musical scale to show how
harmonious perfumes could be composed (figure 2.4116 He was the first to apply the term note to
a distinctive odour, as well as introducing the terms chord, harmony, and progression, all
metaphors that are still current in the perfume industry. Piesse proposed that “sounds appear to
influence the olfactory nerves in certain definite degrees,” (Poucher 1997 p. 50) and that, like in
„ music, there are octaves in odours. According to this theory, a harmonious fragrance can be
composed by bringing together those odour notes that correspond to harmonious musical chords.
The opposite is true of combining olfactory notes that would produce discordant sounds if played
musically together.17
2.4.5 Perhaps one of the most interesting models is the Henning Odor Prism, or Henning Olfactory
Prism (1915-1916) (figure 2.1), a triangular prism that resolves the problem of how to visually
depict the complex variability of smells by presenting them as points on the surface of a three-
dimensional model. The prism has six apexes and five faces, and allows for any smell to be
described in terms of the six categories: flowery/fruity/putrid/spicy/ burnt/resinous. Henning
explains that all smells can be described as being on the surface of the prism, but not within it.
Therefore, a smell cannot be spicy, burnt and resinous as well as being putrid, and likewise, a
fruity, flowery, putrid and spicy odour cannot exist.
14 Carl von Linne, on whose work todays classification of animals and plants is based
15 invented the olfactometer, which measures and detects ambient odour dilution, in 1888. His major work
Physiologie of Olfaction appeared in 1895
16 a multi-dimensional approach rather than a linear spectrum.
17 In his invention, Piesse resembles Des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature, who
composes for himself a “taste symphony” by assigning a different note to each liquor. Via this artifice,
Huysmans’s character could play himself his favorite refrains from classical music by sequentially tasting
various spirits.
25
2.4.5.1 The Henning Prism becomes more interesting when one notes the sub-groupings that the
on-the-surface rule implies. If one covers two of the terms at a time, then looks again at the set of
characteristics flowery/ putrid/spicy/burnt versus the set fruity/putrid/burnt/ resinous. It could be
argued that both groups have enough terms to adequately describe any smell, and there is a risk
of that, but that isn’t what Henning intended.
What is it about these two groups that make them mutually exclusive? Certainly the flowery/fruity/
spicy/ resinous—the general realm of attractive smells—can coexist, but not together with the
putrid and burnt.
The putrid and the burnt both mark out forms of decomposition. The putrid indicates metabolic
decay carried out by simple life forms, whereas the burnt is the rather more chaotic decay caused
by heat (both processes are marked by increasing variety but reducing complexity in the organic
molecules present).
Whereas flowery and fruity scents may, in their freshness, have much in common, according to the
Henning prism they differentiate themselves from each other in their odour profile during
decomposition. Also, it is noteworthy that the flowery/ fruity/putrid (less stable) and the spicy/burnt/
resinous (less volatile) take opposite ends of the Henning Prism.
2.4.5.2 Intriguingly, the Henning Prism also suggests the possibility of charting “smell trajectories,”
that is, the characteristic changes in smell as a perfume’s volatile top note lifts to reveal its middle
and base note, as a fruit ripens, or as an organic product undergoes metabolic decomposition. By
what habitual route does an unripe peach slowly lose its spicy, flowery characteristics to sweeten
into an odour more fruity and perhaps more resinous? And via what path does this scent become
putrid as the peach begins to rot? Is it curved, or straight?
2.4.5.3 Henning attempted to relate different chemical groups to the various sections of his prism,
noting, for instance, that the category of the putrid is marked by volatile sulphides. Unfortunately,
while some molecules might have predictable characteristics, like a bad grammatical model, there
are nearly as many exceptions to each category as well-behaved instances that fit the rules.
2.4.6 In 1951, Dr. Paul Jellinek proposed a new scheme for the classification of scents. Although a
professional perfumer, his system (which has been restated in The Psychological Basis of
Perfumery, 4th Edition, 1997) has the virtue of attempting a degree of generality. The schema,
however, is tendentious in the worst sense. As Jellinek held that the sense of smell is enthralled by
sexuality, he arranges all odours on a scale based on their purported psychological effect (figure
2.5). One axis connects the erogenic to the anti-erogenic, another axis runs from the narcotic to
the stimulating. Following Jellinek, cheesy smells are both highly erogenic and slightly stimulating,
whereas fruity smells are anti-erogenic and somewhat narcotic. The problem, of course, is that as
soon as one questions the psychological model behind the classification, the schema collapses.
And in spite of all the enthusiasm about pheromones, they remain more or less mysterious. It’s
also not advisable to buy synthetic pheromones from dispensing machines in toilets, as
androstenones, the closest pheromones to humans that have been extensively synthesized, are
from the family porcine. The only mammals that you are likely to arouse irresistibly are pigs.
2.5.0 Conclusion
These three issues—the apparent subjectivity of smell, the difficulty in describing odours and the
overwhelming complexity of classificatory systems—appear at first sight to present overwhelming
difficulties for any attempt to systematically work with smell as a design tool. It is therefore crucial
to separate the problem of the description of odour from its alleged subjectivity. This is possible if
one removes direct verbal description all together, as the next chapter will attempt to show.
26
Fruity
Putrid
Resinous
Burnt
fig. 2.1 Hans Henning’s Odour Prism, 1915-1916

fig. 2.2 Michael Edwards’s Fragrance Wheel, 1983
v. cirom
FRAt.RANCB CIRCLE
h~ '
^Gl -
fig. 2.3 Fragrance circle used by Drom, a global scent

company founded in Germany in 1911
F Cival
K Vnrbo** [1
O CHronalla L C No«l
C ftnaappla C*nn#mo*
• l*opp«rntr<«
w
Mil;
Tolu
Al*v*»ko» ■ 8w«t»M
0 Mwah
f Am*io»y»«* Om«
I! C«0*«1 ■~+% Hahotrop*
O Boryomoi Q»r*nHim
C Stock* and Pink*

-*
r"*
6 M*nt Firu Balaam
A Torwfvln bu*r> P
<1 trflrvy* Castor
f JcnquH
1 Calami#*
« Poriuyal ClomatU
0 Almond fc Samar
C Camphor Ckiwa
B BajtMfmvood W* Biaraa
A M«* miwiri H*r tt* FrxiQipart
0 Orang* Row«r +**

F Tubaroa* WalHtawa*
K A«*ct* “+> VanlB*
O Vtelot itt* C PaichouU
fig. 2.4 A music-inspired taxonomy of scent offered by Eng

lish chemist and perfumer George William Septimus Piesse
in his seminal book The Art of Perfumery (1857)
>k>I <.tr<>utiiy croft nx.
/^ 0\^
MtfCtMk:
XX /X y itfettUlttia*
«run*ly vrofcnt*
Narvik: tim, cyulnmwt vkHet. flMfiMta
ca!*ut, mttrk'si. hawthorn. rvwJd*
Vtuthirt* twrlkkr, blue lilac. frtsaia
Sultry acacia, white fUac, honeysuckle. broom. jonquil iune
ftlcw.o'wn. nsrmuw. white lily, oran*e Hr*™,
orchid clover, twee! pea
Janroln, tuberac. lilv-of-the-vaileY and wallflower jw both Uihry

and -dimuLitmi
<.'afr>atkin and hyacinth ate both narcotic ant! vtimuJattr^.
fig. 2.5 Perfumer Paul Jellineck’s classification system

3. Concrete (description)
3.1.0 Explanation of project, letter and formulation of concrete odour
Over the course of 2004. I engaged in a series of conversations with Australian perfumer John
Lambeth with the aim of (verbally) disassembling and analysing our associations with concrete.
The dialogue resulted in a list of descriptors; for example cold, grey and heavy.
We then synthesized an odour that evoked these characteristics for us. With the intention of
determining if smell could translate from an olfactory reading to a visual one, we devised an
experiment. A smelling strip was dipped in the solution and sent to five participants, including two
artists, one photographer, one architect and one graphic designer. The focus group was small and
participation was deliberately contained to include only participants within creative fields. These
participants are already familiar with realising ideas and concepts from ephemeral starting points.
3.1.1 The following letter was sent along with the smelling strip. It makes no mention of concrete,
nor does it offer any clues as to the desired response:
Thank you for taking time to contribute to this project.
The story:
An object, which will remain un-named throughout this experiment has been chosen, its properties
(colour, weight, consistency etc) documented both visually and verbally.
Based on these properties an odour was created in collaboration with John Lambeth, senior
perfumer at fragrance company DROM's Sydney headquarters.
This experiment may be completed within a short time frame.

All that is required is a quick visual impression.
The task:
Take a moment to smell the enclosed scent strip and express your perception of its odour in any
creative way on either of the three papers provided in this pack. (There is, however, no need to feel
confined to them.)
The aim of this task is not to guess what the scent is, but to decode its elements step by step, until
a visual representation evolves, remembering that scent can hint at diverse aspects, e.g. weight,
colour, texture.
Note:
A scent starts to change the moment it is exposed to air. Odour elements evaporate leaving new
elements to come to the foreground, changing the odour over time.
This metamorphosis adds value to the experiment. It is recommended to smell the scent strip at
intervals of about 10 minutes (This specific scent is at its best after being exposed for about one
hour.) As soon as the strip is inserted back into its cellophane pack, the smell remains ‘frozen’, or
preserved as it is at that moment.
Result:
Your interpretation, along with those of the other participants will be analyzed in order to ascertain if
smell can be represented visually.
Time frame:
I’m looking forward to the result and would be thrilled to receive your design within the next two
weeks. Please contact me by email or mobile phone when a pick-up is convenient or use my
address sticker and the stamps provided to return it by post.
(Wagner 2005)
27
The results were decisive. Four of the invited participants responded with creative material. The
architect submitted a photograph, the artist and graphic designer submitted a drawing each; the
photographer submitted three drawings. Their submissions were overwhelmingly monochromatic,
in varying grey tones, dispersed with small parts of green and yellow.18
Figures 3.1, 3.2, 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.3.3 illustrate these outcomes
3.2.0 Confirmation of hypothesis
Not only did the artists produce a consistent visual response to the stimulus, but we were surprised
to note that the project appeared to disprove once and for all the commonly held belief that smells
are completely subjective.
Our results indicated that even if no two people have exactly the same experience, they have very
similar ones. A study that purported to show that smell is subjective could, according to our own
results, indicate something quite different.
Subjects in a "smell survey” conducted at Rockefeller University in New York judged the
intensity and pleasantness of dozens of odours, including a testosterone-derived steroid
called androstenone found in human urine and sweat, especially in men. Most of the
respondents said the compound smelled something like "stale urine”. But a significant
minority - about 20 per cent - found the odour pleasing, saying it reminded them of vanilla
or honey.
(ABC News 2007)
The psychologists concluded, based on their results, that smell is subjective, which might be true
as far as evaluations of “good” and “bad” are concerned. However urine, honey and vanilla,
although different in many ways, could be described with the same colours. The results of our
experiment suggest that odour can be translated into a universal visual language of colour and
form —in short, that a kind of synesthesia is at play, and that its effects might be more predictable
„ than we previously had hoped to believe.
3.2.1 During the 1980s Indian biologists realized that the same molecule is active in both basmati
rice and tiger’s urine—2 acetyl-1 -pyrroline (Brahmachary et al. 1990). Zookeepers had long noted
that resemblance.
Furthermore, we can detect certain pyrazines, such as 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine— which is

found in peas and paprika—at a concentration of 1 part in 500,000 million, that is, virtually
molecule by molecule (Wagner 2009).
3.3.0 Conclusion
It would appear that smell is not subjective, but rather very hard to communicate objectively in
order to achieve any sort of consensus between specialists as well as between laypeople. One
possibility for a functioning smell taxonomy would be to unwind the color wheel model, and ask
how many dimensions it would have to incorporate in order that all its observable contradictions
disappear, which would suggest a taxonomy mapped in at least 3 dimensions.
The benefit of this experiment, from a design perspective, is that it shows that smell can produce
objective and apparently universal effects, regardless of whether or not we can adequately verbally
communicate them.
18 Green and yellow, although not featured in the discussion of ‘concrete’, may have been identified in the
top note of the fragrance composition according to further analysis and discussions with John Lambeth.
28
fig. 3.1 Solution to Concrete project by Janet Laurence
fig. 3.2 Solution to Concrete project by Adrian Lahoud
fig. 3.3.1 Solution to Concrete project by Anthony Browell
fig. 3.3.3 Solution to Concrete project by Anthony Browell
4. Edinburgh (time)
‘We do not draw images through our senses’, [Augustine] wrote, ‘but discern them
inwardly not through images but as they really are and through the concepts themselves. ’
(Harrison 1998 pp. 31-32)
4.1.0 Introduction to the Project
From March 31 to April 12, 2008, the Porosity Studio19 scholarship brought 60 students from
Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia, Korea and Singapore to the Faculty of Architecture at
the University of Edinburgh for a two week design studio. The Studio, sponsored by the British
Council as part of the international Creative Citie&° projects, was invited to work in collaboration
with students and practitioners from the visual arts, architecture, urban planning, design, and
engineering faculties in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The brief, titled By the Throat, asked for an analysis of neighbouring cities Edinburgh and Glasgow,
and proposals to engage the vacant suburban landscape between Scotland's two largest cities.
Separated by some 60 km of depressed commuter habitations, the two cities are locked in uneasy
orbit around each other. Their relationship, and the physical space between, presented an
intractable problem that no student could readily solve.
4.2.0 By the Throat
The brief ran, in part, as follows:
“By the Throat” is exploring the possible connections between Glasgow city and
Edinburgh city at the very neck of the United Kingdom. Whether this is a linear city or
complex urban coagulation will be explored in conjunction with another existing project for
the master-plan of Leigh Docklands in Edinburgh. Combining these two existing problems
creates dual metaphors of neck and mouth insinuating the body into the equation. The
choice of macro or micro scales of research will be the choice of each student or future
collaborative groups. Students are encouraged to bring their expertise and lines of enquiry
into the project and perhaps test these devices at another scale and with other students.
(Porosity Studio 2008 web)
Research Questions
How can we connect two separate entities of the organism of the United Kingdom?
How can this structure form a model for other connections within the United Kingdom?
How can these ideas form the basis of a new city structure for Edinburgh?
Can this thinking be applied to public space and its structures alone?
What role does public art play in this equation ?
What role does object design play in this equation?
What role does engineering play in this equation?
By the Throat is in the business of finding new ideas and approaches via individual
actions, conversation and collaboration.
(Porosity Studio 2008 web)
19 The Porosity studio uses real sites and projects as armatures for ideas about the body and the city which
can be applied to other situations. Both collaboration and adherence to the specific problem always remain
optional within the studio. What characterises the program is its pursuit of innovation at a variety of scales
and equal power given to all disciplines. (Porosity Studio 2008 web)
20 ...a three year cultural and artistic partnership between East Asia and the UK to develop creative cities with
successful knowledge economies where global citizens can thrive. (Porosity Studio 2008 web)
29
4.3.0 Solution to brief
In response to this set brief, and the almost insurmountable difficulties it posed, I developed a
project titled 25, 22, 11.
My premise ran as follows: when we are exposed to an odour for a long period of time we are
increasingly unable to smell it. This neuro-physiological phenomena is referred to as anosmia.
Similarly, when we are exposed to a frustrating problem over a long period of time, we gradually
simply accept it as a fact, and lose the ability to focus of a speedy resolution. 25, 22, 11 set out to
use anosmia as a tool to assist the designers working on the brief:
The project 25, 22, 11 is less about an explicit solution to the Edinburgh/Glasgow dilemma
put forward by the British Council and Porosity Studio. It chooses rather to comment on
the validity of creative problem solving techniques that often end with diluted solutions of
the original brief in addition to aesthetic or technological distractions.
Project 25, 22, 11
It is well known that when we get used to a fragrance we loose the ability to smell it.
Air freshener company AmbiPur have solved this problem by creating 3volution™ an air-
freshener dispenser that rotates its fragrances every 45 minutes.
The project 25, 22, 11 hypothesises that the ‘creative problem solver’ would also benefit
from this continuous, timed reminder. Therefore the project 25, 22, 11 works as follows:
The three AmbiPur fragrances have been removed from the dispenser and replaced by
three ambiguous odours (numbered 25, 22, 11), that represent three problems to be
solved. On every 45 minute rotation the odour representation of the problem fills the air
and herewith comes the reminder to re-focus on creating an explicit solution.
The three highlighted problems—rigidity, neuroticism and rivalry—refer to the original brief
and its diagnosis of the difficulties affecting the connection between the Scottish cities
Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Lastly, due to the re-useable design of the AmbiPur dispenser, once one or all of the
problems have been resolved a new set of odours, that represent a new set of problems,
can be inserted and the process starts afresh.
(Porosity Studio 2008 p. 30)
4.4.0 Phenomenological Discussion (experience of time through smell)
Although smell is not heavily discussed in the phenomenological literature, time is a central theme.
The structure and consistency of time, as an experiential unit21 is uneven: time quickens and
slows, is experienced as interrupted or punctuated by events, or drags with boredom or lethargy.
4.4.1 Heidegger writes about time at length. He writes of the kind of organic progress of time by
which a flower opens, or fruit ripens. Such movements of time are not independent of diurnal
cycles or the passing of lunar phases, but also contain their own inner logic. Organic bodies grow,
ripen and decay due to causes that are at least in part internal.
21 as opposed to metric time, measured in terms of the rotation of the Earth on its own axis and around the
sun
30
4.4.2 Remembering and forgetting, the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious
mind, are much the same. A small external stimulus can trigger a flood of reminiscences, or utterly
erase a gradually developed thought. The Edinburgh project explicitly toyed with precisely this
quality of time. By interrupting the space in which the designers worked with a single invisible
stimulus, it reminded them of the task which they had almost forgotten, the insoluble task that they
had been called together to work upon in the first place.
4.5.0 Conclusion
The project 25, 22, 11 explicitly did not solve the Edinburgh-Glasgow problem. Rather, it exploited
not only the neuro-physiological phenomena of anosmia, but also smell as a reminder of time (a
trigger for memory) to create a new kind of tool. Dispersing the odour into the room directly
changed the structure of the space, dissolving the previous built environment and creating a new
one, identical in its appearance but novel for its inhabitants. The room, which had been up until
that moment passively perceived in terms of a familiar built environment, suddenly became
performative. Changing the smell literally transformed the habitat, and with it, habit, acting as a
reminder and (literally) an inspiration. Before long anosmia took its course and slowly settled back
into a kind of amnesia, in which the design studio participants idly waited for a solution that never
came. Only to be jolted back by the change in fragrance from the dispenser, (figures 4.1, 4.2)
31
E.G: why the connection stinks
rigidity:______33.3333333%
neuroticism: 33.3333333%
rivalry: 33.3333333%
fig. 4.2 Poster: Why the connection stinks

5. Louvres (movement)
5.1.0 Urban Olfactics 1A/1B was an experiment and exhibition conducted at Blank Space Gallery
on Crown Street, Surry Hills for two hours on 09/02/07. The project’s aims were three-fold. Firstly, it
was an attempt to add to a. library of architectural odours, and secondly to test this topic's
significance for a possible masters thesis. Finally, it was designed and constructed in order to
present odour compositions to an audience in a gallery setting. The installation was an experiment
in so far as the reaction of visitors to the olfactants present was unscripted and a source of study.
Some of the findings were presented at the invitation of the UTS architecture faculty in a public
lecture in March 2007.
5.1.1 Blank Space Gallery was selected for its symmetrical, street facing glass frontage (figure
5.1) . The white walled gallery resembled a vacant boutique or retail outlet. For the purposes of the
installation, the inside space was partitioned into display windows left and right of the central
entrance. Visitors were prompted by the white vinyl lettering "1 A" to enter the left partition first, and
were confronted by a white plinth in the centre of the space. On the plinth sat a glass jar (figure
5.2) containing the odour composition "Open", and 100 paper smelling strips. The participant
dipped one smelling strip, also labelled "1 A", into the solution, and then smelled the sample.
5.1.2 The smelling strip from “1A” was generally discarded on the plinth before the visitor moved
right to partition "1B". Partition "1B", a mirror image of partition "1A", presented the second odour
composition "Closed". The subtle differences between the two odour compositions induced the
visitor to return to partition "1A" with smelling strip "1B" in hand, in order compare and contrast the
two odours more closely.
5.1.3 In order to make the differences between the odours more prominent, the large windows in
front of each partition displayed simple algorithms describing the chemical constituents to the
audience before entering. "Open" contained significantly higher levels of Calone, "Closed"
contained more 2,6-dimethylphenol. Calone is conventionally described as "ozonic", it evokes the
smell of fresh air, wet weather, marine breezes. 2,6-dimethylphenol is a metallic smell, and was
used for its connotations of built and enclosed spaces. The differences between the two perfumes
„ was subtle but clear, and visitors at the installation went back and forth between the two vials to
draw ever finer distinctions. By minimizing the visual stimulus, and presenting a text that could only
be understood after the odours had been examined, the installation forced users to be highly
attentive to their sense of smell. The payoff was simple: this was the first time the majority of
attendees had consciously and carefully smelled anything so blatantly synthetic. More
sophisticated users were very interested in the connotations that were evoked and in the semiotic
relationship between the smells they experienced: that two artificial and abstract odours, could
strongly suggest two concepts as clear as open/closed.
5.1.4 The idea for the opposition between "Open" and "Closed" came from the behavior of
Venetian blinds. Venetian Blinds are normally considered in terms of light and sound: open blinds
let light in, closed blinds do not. Open blinds, however, facilitate the circulation of fresh air. In an
essay presented by the curator Joel Mu, the exhibition was understood as a response to its urban
context:
In cities where our relationship to smell is especially thwarted by highly sophisticated

methods of washing, filtering, incinerating of odourous discharge and the ever increasing
use of personal deodourants and air ‘purifiers’, the role of smell or questions of its
functionality, are characterised by a neutralised environment.
(Mu 2008)
Smell has been reduced by the twin forces of pollution and deodourising to nothing more than a
warning; a semantic content of just “!”. Joel Mu captures the central problem that the installation
presents:
32
Why do we have this compulsion to conceive of smells as being purely pleasurable or
not? Mr Mu writes. Perhaps it is the absence of a satisfactory classification scheme,
explained by abstract terms and concepts, such as red or blue. In contrast to colours, the
classification of smells is either tied to terms referring to objects or condition. A smell is
understood as “lavender rotting”, for instance, but to smell “open” and “close” becomes
entirely baffling.
(Mu 2008)
To smell “open” and “closed” is baffling because what it presents is both novel and obvious. The
sense of smell constantly provides information about the environment, and does so most pointedly
when an environment is in a state of flux. Joel Mu's essay was the only document presented with
the exhibition that explicitly mentioned the metaphor of the louvre and the idea of movement. But
the experience of movement, both between the window displays, and between the smells, was a
central part of every visitors experience of the work. The participant, on smelling the scent "Open"
in the space named 1A was made to cross into the space labelled 1B before they could smell
"Closed". It was only in hindsight and juxtaposition that the scent became comprehensible. The
correct experience depended on time and memory. If the two scents had been displayed next to
each other the delay and sequence would have caused the odours to blend and the outcome
would have been unsatisfactory. To enforce a delay changed Urban Olfactics from being a
demonstration to being an experiential machine where the participants were necessary
components. The physical louvre functioned as a visual key to this puzzle, presenting a machine22
that changes state from open to closed to open in order to manipulate atmosphere.
5.2.0 Reflection and Development
From the perspective of installation design, the Urban Olfactics 1A/1B experiment has not been
without results. After reflecting on the two hour experiment, the spaces of subsequent olfactory
presentations were more carefully constructed. The relaxed atmosphere that usually applies to
gallery/exhibition openings was found to conflict with rigorous procedures of enquiry. Music, along
with the consumption of alcohol and tobacco, interfered with how visitors interacted with the
olfactory work. In addition, the audience must be asked to refrain from applying any personal
* fragrance before attending as it unquestionably interferes with everyone’s experience of the odour.
The analysis of scent, an activity that is unfamiliar to an inexpert audience, requires concentration
and attentive observation.
The use of very specific language, describing the work as an "experiment" rather than an
"exhibition", may help to clearly prescribe the required participant demeanor. Likewise, there are
strong advantages to employing a scientific aesthetic, in this case, with the aid of transparent glass
jars, white smelling strips and chemical formulae. By appearing scientific, Urban Olfactics 1A/1B
presented itself as without strong cues. In the realm of commercial smell, this is highly unusual, as
synthetic smells are almost always associated with visual cues (flowers or fruits) in order to make
them as desirable as possible. This has the negative outcome of allowing visual primers to
dominate the observer's smell perception, letting the stronger visual sense overtake (Engen 1987)
5.3.0 Kant on form (Critique of Judgment)
According to the Critique of Judgment, odours can never attain the status of beauty, at best they
can be pleasant.23 Kant believed that a scent can never be beautiful because beauty is dependent
upon form, which is a comparison of the differences between tones (whether they be of music or
colour). Scent, according to Kant, does not allow the subject to compare different tones, but only
22 Literally a baffle: “a device used to restrain the flow of a fluid, gas, or loose material or to prevent the
spreading of sound or light in a particular direction.” (American Dictionary of Standard Usage)
23 In this context it is somewhat ironic that Kant has often used the rose as an example of a beautiful object
33
offers a single, obscure sensation. Whereas music and colour offer substance for thought, scent
merely provides a pleasant or unpleasant experience. (Kant 1914)
5.3.1 Kant was not alone in his view. Condillac also argued in his dissertation Treatise on the
Sensations (1754) that smell only offers pleasure or displeasure for the mind, but nothing that
could be considered an object of contemplation: smell can only cause pleasure or pain, but can not
offer knowledge of spatiality or the external world.
5.3.2 Urban Olfactics 1A/1B contradicts this doctrine some 200 years later as it offers its audience
the possibility of comparing precise and objective tonal differences in a smell. The odours give
each other form in precisely the way that Kant and Condillac declared impossible.24 Urban
Olfactics 1 A/1 B is the simplest experiment that can be constructed to demonstrate not only how
complex smells can be, but also how they can be the basis for experiential machines. Urban
Olfactics 1 A/1 B is an example of odour creating a dynamic architecture, and how such a minimal
architecture could structure an entire environment.
24 This is not to say this is the first time this argument has been made. Septimus Piesse, author of the 1857
book The Art of Perfumery and Methods of Obtaining the Odours of Plants, arranged smell on a musical
scale to show how harmonious perfumes ought to be composed and argued that there are octaves in odours
just as there are octaves in music (see figure 2.4). Even today, perfumers routinely refer to individual scents
as "notes".
34
6. Thisiscurating1-40 (art)
[...] no fine art can be based upon odours, for the human race at least. There are no
associated emotions upon which the art could play
(Grant Allen in Van Toiler & Dodd 1988 p. 16)
The cuts, or rather the hole, the first holes, did not signify the destruction of the canvas [...]
it introduced a dimension beyond the painting itself; this was the freedom to produce art
by whatever means and in whatever form.
(Lucio Fontana in Auping 2007 p. 41)
In commenting upon Grant Allen’s doctrine, Van Toller and Dodd reply that Allen “could not have
known that the neurons of the olfactory system terminate in that part of the brain which is now
thought to be the seat of emotion” (Grant Allen in Van Toller & Dodd 1988 p. 16), and could
therefore have as strong a relationship to artistic appreciation as sight or hearing.25
The quote from the artist Lucio Fontana comes nearly a hundred years after Allen. In it, he made
the by now conventional avant garde assertion that nothing is excluded from the domain of art.
This Chapter discusses smell in the context of the art gallery; how smell acts as a covert agent
creating atmosphere as well as offering an artistic material as close to the immaterial as any yet
explored.
6.1.0 Description of exhibition
To me, the sense of place has not only a mystery but has the sense of metaphysical fact. I
have come to distrust the episodic, and i hope that my painting has the impact of giving
someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own
individuality, and at the same time of his connection to others, who are also separate...
(Barnett Newman in Auping 2007 p. 31)
* Jhisiscuratingl-40 was an exhibition held in May, 2008 at First Draft gallery in Sydney.
Curated by Joel Mu, the exhibition, as the title suggests, presented 40 works by thirteen national
and international artists, who submitted 3 works each. The work included was diverse: sculpture,
drawing, painting, photography, video and installation.
The 40th work was represented in the curation of the space. Temporary cardboard walls covered
the doors and windows reconfiguring the floor plan of the gallery in a manner that was intentionally
routine-breaking for those familiar with the conventional layout of First Draft. The building’s loading
dock became the main entrance, and the interior wall partitions that were pushed aside. This
rearrangement created a sense that the exhibition had been closely curated; that space was being
deliberately manipulated and carefully controlled. These renovations also hinted at and primed
visitors for other invisible changes within the exhibition.
Titled 1, 2-40 my submission consisted of one work designed to (playfully, unobtrusively) dominate
all the 39 other submissions.
How much room should a work of art have to "breathe”?

(O’Doherty 1999 p. 27)
A fragrance atomizer mounted in the crevice between two walls sprayed a fine mist of odour
particles into the air. The only visible sign to suggest it was present was a blue light which
25 For more information return to Chapter 1, Introduction, 1.2.0 A brief scientific history of smell
35
illuminated the machine once it was turned on. Deliberately hiding the work minimised the chance
of it being perceived via a sense other than smell (figure 6.1).
The odour itself was the same used in the Concrete project in 2004. It was chosen in part because
it complemented the materials used in the gallery’s interior well enough to be unobtrusive, and also
in reference to my history of research into the smell. The odour covered the space adequately. It
was not commented on, and perhaps not even consciously noticed, by a single visitor. The
atomizer was also not treated suspiciously; no one questioned its inclusion or exclusion to the
exhibition.
The name 1, 2-40 was chosen as it echoed the name of the exhibition. Its intention was to cover all
works equally, and thereby represent, encroach on or become part of all 39 works. Furthermore, by
parodying the title of the exhibition, the work also displayed a parasitic desire to mimic and
displace the pretension to curatorial authority of the exhibition itself.
The presence of the odour meant that visitors walked through a double space; the one that they
were aware of, and its double, the one that I had filled with the concrete odour. The other works of
art were left no space to breathe. They were joined not only in the normal ways (by exhibition title
and inclusion within a visually demarcated space), but they were also joined into an invisible
community, like the Roman spectators at the colosseum referred to in the introduction:
Putting on a good show in antiquity [...] involved putting on a good scent. The spicy, sweet
scents offered to the spectators at such events would not only serve to please and excite
them, but would help make them feel involved in the activities in a way that a purely visual
display could not. Not only would the spectators see and greet the pageantry, they would
breathe It in and feel identified with it and each other.
(Classen et al. 1994 p. 26-27)
6.2.0 Reflections on Exhibition: Art as Interpretive Frame
It is good to keep in mind [...] that the dramatic sense of space artists today inherit owes a
good deal to certain abstract artists working in the 1950s and '60s who created one of the
most challenging and dynamic moments in the art of the twentieth century.
(Auping 2007 p. 9)
In 2007, Chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, Michael Auping, organised
an exhibition titled Declaring Space. Displayed were the works of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman,
Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, four intercontinental, abstract painters working on ideas of space
beyond the tangible in the 1950s and 60s.
Tactile space, or, for the sake of simplicity, let us call it air, which exists between objects or
shapes in the picture, is painted so that it gives that sensation of a solid. That is, air in a
tactile painting is represented as an actual substance rather than as an emptiness.
(Rothko in Auping 2007 p. 21)
Abstract painting has much to teach us about spatiality. Firstly, the two-dimensionality of the picture
plane implies a constraint upon the viewer, a single ideal position from which to look into an
imagined realm. The painting and the viewer confront each other face to face. Secondly, colour
field abstraction (from Rothko and Newman onwards) implies a void behind the picture plane. This
void is later made literal in the installations of James Turrel and Anish Kapor, much as the
penetration of the picture plane is explicit in the work of Fontana. Within this void is an
atmosphere: formless, but sensible.
Interestingly, Fontana backs his slit pictures with a black solid in order to keep the viewer engaged
with the void, not intrigued with what exists, physically, behind the painting (the wall, the back of
the canvas). What is behind the slit is that which is non-representational. Klein's white space is
36
tangible because it exists within a building, a gallery, and therefore it has prescribed spatial
meaning. Fontana's slit does not have prescribed meaning in the same sense, because it doesn't
fill space, it hints at the infinite, (figures 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5)
This consideration of atmosphere brings us back to some basic characteristics of abstract art.
Abstract painting is non-representational. To satisfactorily experience such work, a viewer must be
in the presence of the original painting (Berger 1972). One must experience abstract expressionist
paintings, the doctrine runs, in the original if one is to make any sense of them at all. A postcard,
even a poster, is not good enough. It is with abstract expressionism that the emphasis on the
necessity of the direct proximity of an artwork reaches its most fervent pitch. This emphasis is, in
the end, an insistence upon the aura of the painted work in the midst of limitless mechanical
reproduction.
Sculpture (which Bohme claims is the closest of the fine arts to architecture)26 and installation, by
way of contrast to both abstract painting and smell, offers multiple positions from which to view the
work. Walking around a sculpture (the circumnavigation that is supposed to provide the ideal
experience of a work) provides a sequence of positions. By acknowledging each position as
peculiar-but-valid, sculpture also affirms the validity of each subjective judgment, a confirmation of
the importance of the viewer's subjectivity.
It could be argued that the emphasis on unrepresentable space in painting begins much earlier
than the 1950s. Sloterdijk has written, in regard to Malevich’s Black Square (1913)
The painting [...] is also an icon of the an iconic or preiconic-of the usually invisible
background of the image. The black square is as such placed against a white background
which surrounds it as a quasi-frame; even this difference then comes to be virtually
abolished in his White on White (1918).
O’Doherty argues that framed pictures that hang on the wall clearly demarcate their territory, the
line between “my space” / “your space”. Once the frame came off the painting the amount of white
« space around the picture increased to give the image space to “breathe”. Malevich, Donald Judd
and Frank Stella all approached the problem of space in different ways. Stella collapsed his
paintings into the geometry of their supports. Judd produced “paintings” that could be walked
around. Malevich’s paintings obscure or conceal themselves to make space visible. Smell,
invisible, permeates everything and fills every gap.
Like all terrorism, the aesthetic is reliant on an unmarked background against which
artworks are articulated and which it brings onto the forestage to appear as a
phenomenon in its own right. The prototype of this tendency of modern painting, Kasimir
Malevich’s Black Square from 1913, owes its inexhaustible interpretability to the artist’s
decision to evacuate the pictorial space in favor of a pure, dark plane. Its being-a-square
thus becomes a figure itself of what in other pictorial space is relegated to the background
support.
Artificial smells go beyond being non-representational paintings; they are non-perspectival

paintings (in "perspectives" archaic meaning as the "science of sight" OED). That is, where as
colour-field paintings ought not to be reproduced, or represented, smells offer the immediate
If we briefly review the basic implications of the comparison with other arts - form and content,
expression, meaning, harmony - then sculpture seems to be the closest to architecture. Don’t the
two fields, inasmuch as they both shape matter, work in the domain of the visible? - at which point
the architect, by working for visibility and treating design as lending form to mass, has already
succumbed to the seduction of the arts.
Gemot Bohme in Ursprung 2002 p. 399)
37
presence of a void that cannot be represented, and that is indifferent to the position (and implicitly
the subjectivity) of the viewer. Whereas abstract painting merely depicts a void, smell presents it.
Through smell [...] one interacted with interiors, rather than with surfaces, as one did
through sight.
(Classen, Howes et al. p. 4)
By filling the room with the unobtrusive concrete odour, a very polite act of vandalism had been
undertaken against all the conventional oppositions of curating. At the same time, it was an aid in
transcendence. By covering each work, it welded them into a single invisible continuity, a literal
execution of what is normally a task for metaphor.
For the viewer, this involved an involuntary participation. Physical interaction with art work-
ingesting it, inhaling it—was both unconscious and inescapable.
38
fig. 6.4 Fontana. Ambiente spavale, 1968
7. Cabinet (interiors)
Notes on Scent, A co-written essay published in Cabinet Magazine (Wagner & Jasper 2009) began
by interlacing curious facts about olfaction, and concluded with the difficulties concerning odour
classification. As a starting point, it discussed smell's diminished role in the hierarchy of the senses
established during the enlightenment, and went on to illustrate and describe various, ineffective
classification systems developed from the late 1800s through to the present day. The article was
based on Chapter 1 of this thesis The trouble with Names.
The interest in odour description and classification that was generated by the article culminated in
an invitation to present part of the Masters research in a public lecture and month-long exhibition at
the Cabinet Magazine gallery and event space in Brooklyn, New York. The exhibition was in part
funded by the UNSW PRSS program.
The lecture introduced the audience to basic smell taxonomies, both visually and by odour
examples, that were taken from the library developed as part of the project component
accompanying this thesis.
7.1.0 Description of Exhibition
The exhibition, titled Recent addition to the permanent collection was an experiment in applying
odour in architectural space: the gallery wall was painted with Evernyl, a notoriously tenacious
perfumery base note with the ability to be perceptible to the sense of smell for ten years. The smell
is smooth, sweet, with a slight pungency of something rotting; it suited the warehouse space in a
declining industrial precinct well.
What you smelled when you entered the exhibition room, in addition to all of the familiar
background smells of the area—paint, urine, cleaning agents, diesel residue, car fumes,
decomposing wood, and concrete dust, all mixed in with the insalubrious effluvia rising off the
Gowanus Canal27—was another background smell. Distinct when you first arrived, but less and
less pronounced with each minute that you spent there, the smell was familiar, though slightly out
, of place.
Only the bare, white walls enclosed the space (figure 7.1). There were no visual cues until the
viewer came to a small pedest that contained a detailed room sheet explaining both the presence
of the smell and its history.
7.2.0 History of Oak Moss and Evernyl
Oak moss (Evernia Prunastri) is a lichen found chiefly in Central Europe. It grows in the boughs of
old trees undisturbed by the wind. A symbiosis of a fungus and an algae, oak moss is an indicator
of slow, moldering, graceful decay and was highly sought after as an ingredient for perfumes
throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. It was used in perfumery classics
such as the original Mitsouko by Guerlain28 (1919), amongst hundreds of others.
27 The Gowanus Canal runs through Brooklyn, and is notorious for being the most polluted water-way in New
York
28 Guerlain is one of the worlds oldest perfume and cosmetic brands founded in 1828, Paris, France.
Mitsouko is the creation of Jacques Guerlain, grandson of the company’s founder Pierre-Frangois Pascal
Guerlain
39
The scent of real oak moss is a composite of Evernyl and many other molecules, but genuine oak
moss is rare, expensive, and causes allergies.29 To make matters more complicated, it is no longer
widely available in commercial quantities, as many of the best remaining natural sources are
located deep in the Ukraine, near the town of Chernobyl, and oak moss, as an epiphyte, has a
tendency to soak up radioactive particles.
Oak moss will no longer be available from 2010, as a ban on any use of natural oak moss in
perfumes by IFRA30 comes into effect. So it is that the actual smell of oak moss, with all its
connotations of elegance and masculine decay, falls away into history. It is decomposed into its
parts, and one composite, Evernyl, a synthetic masquerading as natural, is made to stand in for all
the rest.
Evernyl, also known as Mousse Metra, Veramoss, or methyl 2,4-dihydroxy-3,6-dimethyl-benzoate,

is a component of the extract of oak moss. The smell of Evernyl has been curtly described by
Stephan Jellinek in Perfumery: Practice and Principles (Calkin & Jellinek 1994) as “dusty.” It was
first synthesized in 1898. In the postwar period, Evernyl increasingly displaced the use of natural
oak moss, being an ingredient of Anais-Anai's (1978) as well as the revised Mitsouko.
7.3.0 Reflection on Exhibition
The Cabinet exhibition was the first instance where the relationship of smell to architectural space
was tested explicitly. In the context of Thisiscurating1-40, the odour 1, 2-40 subverted conventional
curating methods by not announcing its presence. Most visitors were simply not consciously aware
of its effect, and its presence was primarily a response to questions internal to art and curating.
The understating of the work was a cause of irritation to critics and commentators. In an article
written for Runway magazine, the artist Lisa Kelly made the following observations:
The first Saturday talk had an interesting example of a reluctant speaker—a participant
whose work occupied a liminal space in the show as a ‘perfume’ or smell, for whom it
seemed that to speak freely about its fabrication or makeup might diminish this marginality
and in turn its effect. This was probably quite true, but it set up a funny conflict given that
the work only really came to light via the construct of the talk, which the artist met with a
concerted effort to say as little as possible, obstinately dodging and resisting the groups
natural curiosity.
(Lisa Kelly 2008 p. 7)
The criticism was valid. Even attending the artist’s talk undermined, to some extent, the work’s
surly refusal to participate in the exhibition on equal terms with the other works. Had my intentions
been followed to their logical conclusion, I would have been absent from the discussion.
By way of contrast, the Cabinet exhibition Recent addition to the permanent collection could not
have been more different. The use of Evernyl was clearly advertised and explained, with room
sheets, signage and a public lecture. Indeed, there was nothing else to see. The audience was
asked to explicitly question their knowledge about how smell works. By being made obvious, the
presence of the smell became a conscious fact, rather than, via the operation of anosmia, slipping
back into a kind of mood. This foregrounding of smell made the exhibition a popular success.
Verbal feedback after the lecture was enthusiastic, and Cabinet was subsequently contacted by a
number of individuals, including academics from Parson’s School of Design and the editor of the
magazine Esopus, Todd Lippy. Popular success is not, however, necessary to the construction of
29 This is determined using the "human repeated insult patch test"(Ehret 1992). As a result of allergic
reactions, Mitsouko has been reformulated, much to the horror of the perfume industry and Mitsouko’s
devoted fans
30 International Fragrance Association

40
atmosphere, which —it could be argued —is at its most persuasive when it is at its most discreet.
These considerations can be made clear with the use of Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition A Forest of
Lines, held as part of the Sydney Biennale, where the failure to appropriately control the olfactory
register of the installation made smell explicit, but also disrupted the intended effect of the
installation.
7.4.0 Pierre Huyghe (description of exhibition)
Ambience, mood and atmosphere are words frequently used in both art and architecture—dosing
an interior wall with a single molecule, as in the Cabinet exhibition, was a decisive way to show
how ambience matters. However, smell is often overlooked as an atmospheric tool. This was
highlighted in a recent exhibition by installation artists Pierre Huyghe:
For 24 hours on July 9, 2008, artist Pierre Huyghe installed a forest in the Concert Hall of the
Sydney Opera House as part of the Sydney Biennale. A Forest of Lines (figure 7.4) transformed
the space into an eery post-apocalypse sanctum. The dark, damp landscape of palms and fog
made the building seem aged; a ruin. There was minimal overhead light. The visitors had to rely on
torches that were strapped to their heads. The faint voice of a girl singing and strumming a guitar
echoed through the acoustic space. With only a limited number of participants permitted entrance
at one time, human life was well dispersed, creating the allusion of a chance oasis.
Unfortunately, the sweet smell emanating from the fog-producing smoke machine unintentionally
emphasized the installation as fabricated. We can assume that the effect was unintentional
because the primary function of the smoke machine was its visual effect—a mist that obscured the
limits of the enormous room and added to the visually persuasive appearance of the forest31.
However the olfactory impact of the smoke machines was precisely the opposite of its visual effect.
The smoke smelled sweet and very dry, giving the impression that the forest had been prematurely
embalmed in a preservative powder. The simple addition of a synthesised forest smell may well
have intensified the visitor’s experience within the installation.
7.4.1 Rainforest Scent (suggestion)
A retrospective scent for Huyghe’s exhibition was developed, in hindsight, via consultation with
perfumer John Lambeth. The odour, Rainforest, contains molecules derived from the mushroom,
and the smell of dense, damp forrest undergrowth. The scent is part of the olfactory library,
included in the project component of this thesis.
Rainforest is a mixture of woody notes (patchouli), mushroom notes (amyl vinyl carbinol), and
earth notes, largely geosmin and methyl vinyl borneol.
It would be possible for Rainforest to be added to the smoke machine liquid directly and dispersed
throughout the space. If an additional machine is to be used for scent distribution, it would be
important to use a fragrance-free liquid in the smoke machine (such materials are commercially
available).
7.5.0 Gernot Bohme and Henri Lefebvre on Atmosphere
In dealing with smell and space, and smell’s power to communicate ideas beyond the tangible, the
Cabinet and Pierre Huyghe exhibitions raised questions that relate to the construction of
atmospheres. The Pierre Huyghe exhibition might be considered, on the olfactory level, less than
successful. The Cabinet exhibition was a popular success, and a useful pedagogic tool for
introducing smell to a highly engaged audience. However neither exhibition designed an
31 From the quotes in the exhibition catalogue it was clear that sight and sound were the two factors
considered by the artist as contributing to the creation of an environment. The smell of the space was not
mentioned. (http://www.bos20Q8.com/Daae/Dierre huvahe archive.html accessed 20/04/09)
41
atmosphere that was both persuasive and subliminal. This question remains an open one,
however at the end of chapter eight of this thesis, a speculative project is suggested that might
potentially achieve both aims. This requires more consideration of what kind of persuasion is
required.
Visual communication is dominant in in the rhetoric of architecture. The importance of visual

communication of architecture cannot be underestimated, especially due to the contemporary
expectations of clients and competition boards. In particular, the resolution and apparent objectivity
of photography is crucial.
And yet there is something odd about architecture allowing itself to be photographed in
the first place. For it is indeed strange that architecture, the most three-dimensional thing
people have learned to create, something which humans make for themselves but which
cannot be moved, cannot be understood in a moment, has an outside and an inside, a
topside and underside, this unique phenomenon, has been the subject of photography
ever since the camera was born.
(Wingardh 2008 p. 148)
Gernot Bohme and the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre take this line of enquiry further. They
questions how the viewer is able to put himself into the work—how the viewer should gain an
understanding of the space before it’s built. Lefebvre relates visibility to readability in this way:
Originally, he says, space was produced before being read; it was not produced in order
to be read or grasped, but rather in order to be lived by people. Yet there are cases in
which space is produced in order to be read. Lefebvre's caveat is that one has to be
aware of things concealed by the impression of intelligibility. He urges us to keep in mind
what the visible/readable and its traps are.
(Goenawan Mohamad 2007 p. 156)
And, because architecture “does not make buildings and constructions in isolation but for
people” (Bohme in Ursprung 2002 p. 405), it should be expected that some attempt would be
,. made to depict atmosphere. As Bohme argues:
[Atmosphere] affects the perception of architecture. If it is true that architecture shapes

space, then one must move about in these spaces in order to evaluate them. We must be
physically present.
(Gernot Bohme in Ursprung 2002 p. 402)
Smell, unlike sight, is not as easily reproduced via technologies as accessible as the camera.
Technology to reproduce smell does exist in the form of gas-chromatography,32 however it is too
expensive and difficult for anyone other than the specialist to use. The smell of a space therefore
remains somewhat place-specific. As Mohamad emphasizes, “one has to be aware of things
concealed by the impression of intelligibility”. This simultaneous legibility and concealment is both
essential to rhetoric, and also to atmosphere, with its corresponding transparency and presence.
Bohme does not explicitly refer to smell, but it is the dimension of architectural rhetoric that
photography excludes.
The decisive experience takes place only when we take part through our presence in the
space formed or created by architecture. [...] And this demonstrates the truth of the
proposition, ascribed to Polykleitos and explicitly notes by Vitruvius, that man is the
measure of architecture though in a different sense than originally intended.
-
(Bohme in Ursprung 2002 pp. 402-403)
32 GC analysis seperates complex odour formulations into their individual substances and can give
perfumers a type of ‘recipe’ to re-construct the smell
42
Smell is halfway between architecture (a solid construction/demarkation of space) and abstract
painting (an attempt to visually represent void space in two dimensions) by adding paint to the
canvas where there is nothing depicted but air. The success of the Cabinet exhibition, and the
limits to Pierre Huyghe’s installation, suggest that the expression of atmospheric conditions of
intangible space are best represented through smell. Peter Sloterdijk, in his own reflections on
painting and curatorial practice arrives at the same point via a different path, namely, an interest in
the reversal of the normal hierarchy between background and foreground, and the indispensable
role of immediate human presence in this reversal, a kind of missing chapter in the history of
architectural rhetoric:
The fundamental gesture of these kinds of form-representations consists in evaluating the

unthematic into the thematic. What is brought into the foreground are not the multiple
possible picture contents that might be placed against an always same background;
instead the background as such is meticulously painted and this turned into the explicit
figure of figure-bearing... The work demands the unconditional surrender of viewer
perception to its real presence.
(Sloterdijk 2009 p. 80-81)
43
fig. 7.1 Interior view, Cabinet Exhibition
a
fig. 7.4 Pierre Huyghe. A Forest es, 2008
mm
8. Miasma (architecture)
Concerns regarding odor have always influenced architecture and urban planning, but such
concerns became most pronounced during the 19th century during public health scares. It could be
argued that the fear of odors did not substantially lessen with the discovery of the germ theory of
disease, but that it was displaced, and continued into modernity with vitreous architecture and
synthetic perfumes and disinfectants. This final section of the thesis considers smell and
architecture from the point of view of the 19th century fear of miasmas and Philip Johnson’s Glass
House, and ends with a speculative project in which techniques of preservation are extended to
include the creation of new kinds of smells that use architectural decomposition as their base.
8.1.0 Materials erode, sag, peel, fade and fray. These indications of decay, visual cues, tell of both
the passage of time and the care given to an item or space during a certain period of time.
Some visual disrepair hints at more serious structural faults: an unsound foundation may be
diagnosed by a cracked wall. These assumptions, via visual cues, are what drive our reflexes, our
actions, and how fast we act upon them.
A “miasmic rupture” is a perforation in either the paint or wallpaper that hermetically seals a wall
(figure 8.1). Ruptures could be found either singly or in multiples and were considered a kind of
architectural disease, not unlike the diseases of the skin such as measles, pox and shingles. Much
like the early 20th century concept of a “neurasthenic breakdown”, the “miasmic rupture” refers to a
condition that is no longer diagnosed — what would previously have been considered a dangerous
“rupture” would now offhandedly be referred to as peeling paint.
The eighteenth century was very keen on the sanitary "coating" of its surface, especially
when the miasmic threat reached its peak in the 1770s. Stone, plaster and even paint
were among the most valued instruments of deodorization. Barely containing some of the
noxious effluvia behind their scaling film, they brought temporary relief to the nose...
(Rodolphe el-Khoury in Drobnick 2006 p. 22)
The presence of a miasmic rupture was understood in the 18th century to indicate that a vapor had
„ forced its way from the interior of the wall and penetrated into the room, where it might spread
disease. As such, the concern with miasmic ruptures can be considered a pre-cursor to
contemporary understanding of microbiology and epidemiology.
Pre-Pasteurian orthodoxy held that sickness arose from pestilential miasmas given off by
the environment, by towns, and by their fetid populations. Stench was, in fact, disease.
(Roy Porter in Corbin 1986 p. vii)
8.1.1 Miasmas in the 18th and 19th Centuries
A miasma is a cloud that brings disease. In ancient Greece it was considered a divine curse, sent
upon a city as punishment for a tragic (and implicitly political) sin, such as the plague that afflicted
Thebes for Oedipus’ crimes of patricide and incest. In later times, a miasma was seen as the result
of vapours from decomposing organic matter (miasmata) that could cause cholera and other
diseases.
Scientific discovery, philosophic fashion and social context can change the way in which we see
phenomena. The significance granted to miasma ruptures in the buildings of seventeenth century
Paris is utterly foreign to us today. Whereas now we perceive the miasma rupture as a simple sign
of age, in the past its presence was more sinister.
In the now vast literature on understandings of epidemic diseases and fevers from the
Back Death to the late seventeenth century, one constant is the perceived threat of foul
vapors released form decaying matter and from stagnant water. These stenches were
thought to corrupt and putrefy and generate plague in those most vulnerable to infection.
44
The air literally reeked of death... No real distinction was made between airborne spread
and contact, as both terms referred to the passing of a poison or taint and both were used
interchangeably. Miasma was thought to lurk and be transported in victims' clothes, in
their baggage or to be spread through their foul breath
(Cowan et al. 2007 p. 26)
The Eighteenth century was a time in which it was still believed stenches and miasmas emanating
from the earth were directly responsible for sickness and death. The possibility of death through a
non-tangible, transparent entity could send the 18th century imagination into overdrive (figure 8.2),
and resulted in a whole number of preventative measures that could be used as a documentation
of the thinking of a certain period of time. As researchers now note, this was not an arbitrary mass
hysteria, but rather the result of real changes in the density and structure of the urban
environment.
As Anthony Wohl notes, increasing population density produced far greater levels of
human wastes in urban areas throughout Western Europe than had previously been the
case... The phase in Western Europe from the later medieval period to the second half of
the eighteenth century paid witness to a relatively gradual reduction in levels of tolerance
for faecal smells... from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the process of reducing
tolerances for such odours became much more rapid and intense [...]
Tolerances of many types of odour, such as stenches emanating from prisons or
graveyards, were reduced because they were held to be threatening to health.
(Cowan et al. 2007 pp. 114-115)
Anxiety about miasmas was a reasonable, if in hindsight overstated, response to changing

historical conditions. Health Commissioners and sanitary reformers in the large cities-Venice,
London and Paris-tirelessly devised new regulations and standards for living to prevent a
potentially catastrophic epidemic from wiping out a large proportion of the population. The great
stench of 1858 was perhaps the most pronounced of a series of such panics, and one that
culminated in the proposed evacuation of London:
In London, for example, the summer of 1858 was so foul that it was suggested the
Parliament be moved out of the city
(Classen et al. 1994 p. 80)
8.1.2 Description of Miasmic Ruptures
A miasmic rupture in the built environment, like “a crack in wall revetment would have caused
much alarm; it was not merely a symptom of structural fatigue but also a breach in the seal that
kept the telluric influence hermetically locked behind the surface.” (Rodolphe el-Khoury in Drobnick
2006 p. 26).
With miasma holes comes a smell; a damp, mouldy, decomposition, it enters the body directly,
without a medium in between. It pollutes, but cannot be seen, therefore unleashing fear, a battle
with the invisible. The utmost was done to prevent these emanations from exiting the underworld.
We owe paved roads and sidewalks outdoors, along with wallpaper and indoor wall paint to these
beliefs and strict government regulations that resulted from them:
The paving imperatives thus extended to the walls: they had to be sealed at the surface.
Otherwise, the mephitic sap that their porous sections incessantly drew through the
foundation would be released into the atmosphere.
(el-Khoury in Drobnick 2006 p. 26)33
33 See also Corbin 1986 p. 26

45
Since smooth surfaces made it easier to control flows, it was quite logical to acknowledge
the advantages of enamel and varnish, which air and water slid off unhindered
(Corbin in Drobnick 2006 p. 26)
Rodolphe el-Khoury describes the mechanism of contamination in interesting detail:
Much like the soil that held the excremental history of the city, walls were known to absorb
and retain the noxious vapors of the surrounding air. The persistence of this miasmic
impregnation was noted by many "observers" who recognized a lingering odor emanating
from surrounding walls years after its actual source had been removed from the space.
The revetment was thus needed to shield the permeable wall form external influences as
much as to contain the ascending ramifications of the miasmic earth. Mathieu Geraud
argued that the thick wall tapestries of medieval interiors were better suited to this double
task than modern wall papers and fabrics, which he considered far too flimsy and
dangerously permeable (Geraud 1786:34)
(el-Khoury in Drobnick 2006 p. 26)
The miasma hole declares space. It be compared to Fontana's space beyond (not behind) the
canvas. In the case of miasma holes, the abject penetrates into the domestic space via ruptures. In
this sense, fear of miasma is a precursor to the twentieth century fear of the uncanny. The
following four quotes give some idea of the interrelation between miasmas, the uncanny, and the
fear of pollution by foreign or familiar bodies:
In the Parisian imaginary, the subterranean soil amounted to a gigantic reservoir where
the remains and waste of past generations precipitated into a horrific brew. Under the
street thus lay the excremental past of the city, ready to burst forth again at any
opportunity: a fissure in the ground, the digging of a well, an excavation for a building's
foundation.
It was a society that, torn between fascination for the private refuge and obsession with
‘‘atmospheric captivity, ” dreamed about “air baths” but snugly shut away its chlorotic
daughters and languishing wives.
(Corbin 1986 p. 163)
...even without any intrusion from the stench of the masses, “the family atmosphere” could
be deadly. The accumulated noxiousness of miasmic exhalations, which, by virtue of
being related through kinship and heredity, were of the same nature, constituted in itself a
morbid menace. [...] As a result of this constant familial “miasmic intercourse,” every
house had both its own odor and its “specific endemic diseases, ” kept alive by the
mephitism of the walls.
(Corbin 1986 p. 163)
Rooms had to be aired after the maid had stayed in them for an extended period, after a
peasant woman had called, or after a workers’ delegation had passed through.
(Corbin 1986 p. 231)
46
8.2.0 The smell of Philip Johnson’s Glass House
Through the filter of available scholarship, the Johnson house appears distorted into an
odourless image of a glass house.
(Otero-Pailos 2008 p40)
Philip Johnson’s Glass House (figure 8.3) is a canonical building: an essay in elegance,
minimalism and proportion. Kenneth Frampton, Peter Eisenman, Vincent Scully, Robert A M Stern
and Jeffrey Kipnis have all written on it, and it remains a point of reference in contemporary
research, a kind of perfection in vitro.
It is worth noting that in the time that the Johnson house was built and first used, the problems
posed by odour and disinfecting were again a source of mass anxiety in America. The 1950s
marks a period that in some way mirrors the miasma hysteria of the late 18th Century. If our image
of 18th and 19th Century urban life is characterized by perpetual dirt and disease, our collective
nostalgia for the 1950s is prompted by lemon and other characteristic cleaning odours, by air
fresheners and the images of gleaming white goods attended to by diligent housewives. The
fantasy of space unblemished and antiseptic is not restricted to advertisers, but shared by
architects.
If the white wall gradually gained a universal appeal, it is primarily because of its visual
properties or, more precisely, by virtue of its capacity to translate the olfactory condition of
odourlessness into an image
Likewise, the floor to ceiling glass walls, transparency, and light make the Johnson Glass House,
anachronistically considered, the ultimate solution to the 19th century fear of mephitic vapours and
toxic miasmas. As we imagine the Johnson house, it is perfectly without odour. All the more
surprising then is an excellent account of smell’s contemporary relationship with architecture
published in the Architectural Association journal by Professor of Architectural Preservation at
Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Jorge Otero-Pailos.
The article published in AA Files (issue 57, 2008) by Otero-Pailos comes complete with 3 scratch
and sniff panels34 (figure 8.4). Titled An Olfactory Reconstruction of Philip Johnson's Glass House,
the article, and odours therein, illustrate Otero-Pailos' olfactory suggestions as tools for
reconstruction and preservation. The odours are based on building materials used in the
construction of Johnson's Glass House in 1949.
Rather than simply capturing a “snapshot” of the olfactory profile of the space using a headspace
machine, Otero-Pailos’ research has been based on more indirect approaches, determining what
smells would be likely to be present based on both material and social research. Included are
materials ranging from newly lacquered wood and shiny stainless steel to fresh plaster. Also
included are smells that are representative of social activities that took place within the home, like
smoking (figure 8.5) and cologne wearing. Olfactory elements mentioned in the text include the
damp, decomposing bathroom, cooking, cleaning, and finally, the smell of 1950s men (1950s male
cologne examples used included: Old Spice, Canoe, Acqua Velva). This process of research in
some ways mimics the experiments conducted by public health inspectors in the 19th Century, as
Corbin describes them:
34 Jorge Otero-Pailos worked with perfumer Rosendo Matheu (Director, Puig Perfumery Center, Barcelona,
Spain) to formulate three synthetic perfumes via olfactory reconstruction. Otero-Pailos has had a sustained
interest in architectural preservation. A good example of this is his work at the Venice Biennale, 2009. There,
he used a common latex cleaning technique, normally employed by building restorers, that takes off the dust/
dirt layer from historical buildings.
47
Investigating the air confined and the odors enclosed in the rooms of the house became
the major public health project. Authors of manuals now constantly urged detection of the
places where private stenches stagnated. New anxieties generated and governed
innumerable descriptions of interiors... the descriptions and advice help us to reconstruct
the actual smell of the dwellings and the likely source of each odor
(Corbin 1986 p. 165)
An American architectural icon, the intimate details of Philip Johnson’s Glass House can be
visualised even by those who may never set foot within it due to the proliferation of images, as well
as the various architectural theorists who continue to publish a variety of essays that view the
building form all possible aspects. With this article, Otero-Pailos comments on the narrow
documentation that only visual details allow:
In sum, during the last 60 years, a corpus of scholarship has grown around the visual
dimensions of the Glass House and its role in the social politics of architecture. But we
lack documentation about the house’s odours, or how they were managed, cleaned,
ventilated and perfumed.
(Otero-Pailos 2008 p. 40)
When Frangois Jean Dominique Arago presented the invention of the Daguerrotype to the French
Assembly in 1839, one of the first scientific purposes that he suggested for the new technology of
photography was in the documentation and preservation of significant architecture. However as
noted at the end of chapter seven, smell is the dimension of architectural atmosphere that the
visual rhetoric of photography is unable to capture, and hence conceals. Interestingly, it is a visual
inspection of the house that made the construction of the odour profile in Otero-Pailos’ research
possible:
The plaster ceiling, once pure white, is now yellowed by thousands of cigarettes smoked
below it.
(Otero-Pailos 2008 p. 40)
. A small caption (bottom, center) covered with a yellowing film instructs the reader to release the
embedded scent (scratch and sniff (figure 8.4). The problem of creating an olfactory reconstruction
is of course that the fragrance will be smelled on paper, meaning in its concentrated form and in
close proximity. Perhaps this is the same as viewing a photograph (but because we have been
schooled in images we can assimilate the paper experience to the possible physical experience).
I would argue that Philip Johnson did not actually want the house to be remembered for any smell.
It is important to mention that it is only in hindsight that the olfactory peculiarities of the 1950s are
interesting, or even perceptible. Johnson tried to preserve the image of the house as a visual
entity. Jorge Otero-Pailos research student Leslie Klein, in her masters of architectural
preservation, argues that Philip Johnson very well knew that the house was to be preserved, much
as Harry Seidler played an active role in the preservation (as an architectural icon) of Rose Seidler
house.
Jorge Otero-Pailos argues that Philip Johnson was well aware of the risk of contaminating smell,
designing two pavilions in order to keep his own living quarters quite separate from that of visiting
guests (figure 8.6). Glass is the transparent assurance against miasma from the outside in. Philip
Johnson built himself a personal biosphere, plus somewhere to confine the “other”, in this case,
the guest. Interestingly, the glass pavilion with its floor to ceiling transparency was notoriously
difficult to air as the large glass panels were fixed, the only opening being the door. Pristine
48
architecture has its bluff caught via visual cue: the window-wall, perfectly transparent but
hermetically sealed.35 In this context, it is also a window into the underworld, into the past.
8.3.0 Conclusion. Mould: Space, Time, Decay
This transposition has yet to lose its potency in the rhetoric of hygiene; the myriad of
household products still devoted to the maintenance of the shiny/odourless surface testify
to the longevity of miasmic mythology in the collective imagery.
Sealing emanations into the wall is interesting because the sealing itself becomes decorative, to
conceal miasma’s constant, subtle return over time. Once covered over, it manifests itself by
peeling, bulging due to water or humidity, like a poltergeist. It shows age. it shows decay, it shows
the passage of time. While the attempts at sealing are holding back, pushing back miasma, into
the wall, like sweeping dust under a rug, eventually the walls burst open to breath, to let forth their
porosity, their will.
The walls hide the internal services, not even a gap by which to service them, meaning they are
made completely invisible—out of sight out of mind. The decoration is a kind of chastity, clothing
hiding the structure, the structure hiding the plumbing.
When a building shows signs of disrepair, it signals the smell of the room has changed and is
changing. Decomposition is a process: as it continues the structure breaks down gradually. The
heaviest part, the base, is left standing. It's no longer cared for, no longer inhabited. With ruin
comes the smell of decomposition. The struggle against odour is a crucial part of taking control of
the earth—conquering, making presence felt by not only marketing territory visually to keep out
animal intruders but also by sealing and painting and plastering to keep out invisible intruders who
are also potentially murderous. Fear is made invisible, patched up temporarily.
We need to focus on the smell of mold as the single most significant smell indicating the
decomposition of a building. The salient question would be, what is this mold? what is it that we
„ smell? Is it the byproducts of the mold, or its spores? Are these spores medically harmful, and how,
and how does the intuitive aversion to this smell correspond to a genuine risk?
Typically, molds secrete hydrolytic enzymes, mainly from the hyphal tips. These enzymes
degrade complex biopolymers such as starch, cellulose and lignin into simpler substances
which can be absorbed by the hyphae. In this way, molds play a major role in causing
decomposition of organic material, enabling the recycling of nutrients throughout
ecosystems. Many molds also secrete mycotoxins which, together with hydrolytic
enzymes, inhibit the growth of competing microorganisms.
(Wikipedia Entry http://en. Wikipedia. ora/wiki/Mold accessed 11/01/2010)
Unanswered questions remain around miasma holes. The amorphous blotches left on the surface
of the walls, what are they? What is it that crystalizes?
The inability to detect the slow smell of decomposition is often associated with the elderly and the
mentally ill. A decomposing house can therefore be a mark of absentia, indicating not that the
building has been physically abandoned, but rather that the residents therein are gradually losing
their minds. Social workers have long been trained to identify such smells as cues, and this
professional rule of thumb has recently received corroboration from geriatric psychology. The
inability of the patient to identify common, recognisable scents such as coffee and peppermint is
now an early warning sign of dementia (Kovacs 2003). The elderly also have their peculiar smell.
35 Reminiscent of the death of the girl in james bond Goldfinger. The villain covers her skin in pure gold,
suffocating her.
49
As the metabolism shifts from stasis to gradual decomposition, the odour of the very old can be
described as moldy, sour, rank. The maintenance of both the body and the house, always
ultimately futile activities, first signify entering the final stage via the sense of smell.
One possible project that Otero-Pailos’ research could help shed further light on is this: a
comparison of the smell of a traditional house (with wooden floorboards, natural materials etc) and
the smell of a structure in which synthetic materials are heavily used (such as synthetic carpets,
formica, synthetic sealants, etc), in which both are rotting. Formaldehyde (sticky, sweet?), and
Formica (also a sweet stench, as when linoleum rots) share some characteristics. Which suggests,
implicitly, the idea that houses can be build to ruin gracefully along the axis of smell, as well as
visually.
Flow do we go from a fresh smell to a smell of decay, from the sweet to the sweetly rank, or the
animalic? This relates to the performance of perfumes. If they are flat, the profile does not change.
Some, however, smell worse as the top notes evaporate.
How does the smell of the world change from Autumn (musty, warm decomposition, the earth
exhausted) through to Spring (fresh, new)?
By adding some volatile top notes (such as citrus) to the smell of decay, we get a fresh, full, sweet
smell. The smell of decay (indole, scatol) is not covered or concealed by the top notes, rather it
becomes the base of a new, pleasant bouquet of aromas (this effect is confirmed by studies that
claim that rose perfumes are preferred when contain a little scatol. The smell of shit completes the
floral, making it less sugary and more animalic).
Hypothetically, if we add a particular natural top note to the smell of a decomposing 200 year old
house (defined by the smell of mold). This would give us a kind of flower smell.
Correspondingly, if we add a synthetic top note to the smell of a decomposing 1950s house (one
with lots of plastic), this gives us an explicitly artificial flower-odour. It advertises its fakeness, but at
the same time is an attempt to redeem the plastic, by granting it a kind of spring time of its own, an
„ ability to be returned to the metabolic cycle of life, rather than the endless slow death most
unbiodegradable substances face.
50
fig. 8.1 Miasma Rupture
_j
To act ivat* an* ■: vt * * : • - • o ion of the
Glass House m ?«<■■>-:m*w(v lacquered wood,
shiny '.Tiiniess stets. fiesh plasrerj. rub your
finger across this caption
HHHK
9. Appendices
9.1.0 How to smell (smelling strips)
"When I am thinking and writing down the formula for a perfume, I work as far away as
possible from the test laboratory, away from the products, to protect myself from their
fragrances, which eventually impair your sense of smell."
(Ellena 2007 p. 3)
It makes sense that to be able to analyse an odour effectively it is important to have an odour-free
environment. This includes not wearing any perfume, or having come into contact with extensively
fragranced products (shampoos, soaps, lotions) which could interfere with a precise identification
of an odourant or fragrance composition.
The room in which one is studying should also be neutral - not only devoid of kitchen smells, air-
fresheners, but also without excessive visual and aural stimulation, as these have also been found
to intrude (Ellena 2007)
It is interesting to note that closing ones eyes to block out visuals may help to concentrate on
correct odour identification.
Odours are generally studied on thin strips of thick, absorbable paper, not unlike that used for
artists watercolour. These are referred to as 'smelling strips' or 'blotters'.
A smelling strip should be labeled prior to dipping, with a name, a date, and preferably a time (as
this will help determine evaporation rates).
It is important to hold a smelling strip between thumb and index finger, far away from the end that
has come into contact with the odourous chemical, to avoid contamination (figure 9.1).
When dipping a smelling strip into a solution it is not necessary to submerge it completely. The
♦ smelling strip often has a printed line or triangular tip; it suffices to dip to this point (figure 9.2).
The smelling strip should then be held, with the moistened tip sideways, just below the nose,
making sure not to touch it to the skin as certain chemicals may be irritants at high concentrations
and any contact with the skin could leave molecules behind that will interfere with an analysis of
the next odour (figure 9.3).
It may be necessary to re-smell the strip at intervals. This technique is used in order to establish
the structure of a perfume: its top, middle and base notes. It is therefore important to keep the strip
uncontaminated which can be done by keeping each strip well separate from any other blotters or
surfaces that have come in contact with odour. Fragrance molecules can 'jump'.
Blotters are usually kept upright by perfumers in smelling strip holders or clamps, but by bending
back the strip near the fragranced end, one can place it on a surface without the liquid coming into
foreign contact (figure 9.4)
9.1.1 Smell is not only notoriously difficult to capture, it is also a challenge to store.
Light, heat and air break down fragrance molecules. Top notes, being most volatile, usually
evaporate first when exposed to either or all of these three conditions. Over time middle and base
notes will start to fade.
The shelf life of products that rely on top notes (body lotions and candles for example) is
dramatically reduced—the smell of these products will age noticeably, becoming weaker in a
relatively short amount of time. These products need a fast turn around in order to keep their
"freshness".
51
9.1.2 The most effective way to store fragrance is in dark bottles, with tight lids, preferably
refrigerated at 7 degrees Celsius. Fragrance manufacturers will often add a layer of nitrogen into
the space between the bottle top and the liquid to prevent fragrance break-down due to air
exposure.
52
fig. 9.3 How to "
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53
53
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UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS

MASTERS RESEARCH THESIS 2010

The Architectures of Smell

no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of

elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis.

and linguistic expression is acknowledged.

I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Richard Goodwin

1. the result or product of architectural work, as a building

1. a surrounding or pervading mood, environment, or influence

Smell I Odour I Fragrance I Perfume

These terms form subclasses within each other as follows:

iii. Definition of Terms

This thesis provides an introduction to the appropriate conceptualization, presentation and

1 0 1 Introduction and intent

1.1.0 Explanation of thesis title and project components

1.2.0 Some contemporary theories of atmosphere

1.2.1 Bohme understands atmosphere in relation to how we perceive architecture

1.2.2 Sloterdijk understands atmosphere in relation to culture

1.2.3 Brian O’Doherty understands atmosphere in relation to contemporary art

1.3.0 Methodology and chapter outline

1.4.0 A brief scientific history of smell

1.5.0 A brief social history of smell

2. The trouble with Names (including some failed taxonomies)

2.1.0 Summary of conventional beliefs regarding the difficulty of describing smell

2.2.0 Reformulation of description problem using Trygg Engen

2.3.0 The trouble with Names, a study by l/KS. Brud

< - 2.4.0 Discussion of failed historical taxonomies

3.1.0 Explanation of project, letter and formulation of concrete odour

3.2.0 Confirmation of hypothesis

4.1.0 Introduction to the Project

4.2.0 By the Throat

4.3.0 Solution to brief

4.4.0 Phenomenological Discussion (experience of time through smell)

5.1.0 Urban Olfactics 1A/1B

5.2.0 Reflection and Development

5.3.0 Kant on form (Critique of Judgment)

6.1.0 Description of exhibition

6.2.0 Reflections on Exhibition: Art as Interpretive Frame

7.1.0 Description of Exhibition

7.2.0 History of Oak Moss and Evernyl

7.3.0 Reflection on Exhibition

7.4.0 Pierre Huyghe (description of exhibition)

7.4.1 Rainforest Scent (suggestion)

7.5.0 Gernot Bohme and Henri Lefebvre on Atmosphere

8.1.1 Miasmas in the 18th and 19th Centuries

8.1.2 Description of Miasmic Ruptures

8.2.0 The smell of Philip Johnson’s Glass House

8.3.0 Conclusion. Mould: Space, Time, Decay

9.1.0 How to smell (smelling strips)

1.0.1 Introduction and intent

1.1.0 Explanation of thesis title and project components

“The Architecture of Smell” designates two things:

2. the role of smell in architectural design.

1.2.1 Bohme understands atmosphere in relation to how we perceive architecture

Air-design is the technological response to the phenomenological insight that human

1.2.3 Brian O’Doherty understands atmosphere in relation to contemporary art

1.3.0 Methodology and chapter outline

fig. 2.4 A music-inspired taxonomy of scent offered by Eng