Scented City (still unsure about the title)
New title: The Nose Knows Not
As the modern city grows, it redefines what smells good and what smells bad.
I am exploring the evolution of smell in context of the growth of the city. In today’s architecture and interior design, we can clearly see the rejection of natural smells and odors: white walls, smooth surfaces, shininess, ventilation …
Artificial smell is created to represent what is new and clean and some odors that were previously considered to be pleasant have now become repugnant. We can see the rise of the skyscraper as a way to escape the ‘dirty’ streets. Towers also give a sense of hierarchy. The higher we are the more important we are.
But also this causes us to live further and further away from the natural world. In previous times, structures were close to the grounds where bodies, beasts, sex and feces lived which were considered to be a resource in pharmacy and cosmetics.
“The industrial age elevated whiteness and cleanliness beyond hygienic import to the status of moral values.”
Anna Barbara - Invisible Architecture: Experiencing Places Through the
Sense of Smell “Death/Entropy”
The result is that we start to live in a very artificial world secluded from what exists beyond our walls. The city has become a waste dump. Furthermore we loose our relationship with nature as it becomes less tangible.
It is interesting to think of how our world and us humans would deal with pollution and waste at a large scale. When the outside world becomes uninhabitable, where will we go? Will we live indoors? Find another planet?
Richard Goldstein illustrates well this pessimistic view of our future in The Logical Legend of Heliopause and Cyberfiddle. He shows that the only way to regain our senses of smell and touch is to reconnect with the tangible world.
Tommaso Filippo Marinetti said in his Manifesto (1910):
“The realm of life has become the realm of ‘non-life’; It is a world of death. Death is no longer represented by stinking feces and corpses. Now it symbols are clean, gleaming machines; men are no longer attracted to fetid latrines, but to structures in glass and aluminum.”
Through a structure inspired by Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie, Donald Judd's installations and the Monolith in Kubrick's Space Odyssey, I am building a tall structure where I let the users explore and smell through the protruding ducts odors that have left our lives, maybe forever.
Donuts?
15 years ago
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