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- Smell and Preservation
- Abstract: Olfaction is a major part of the experience of historic places and is intimately involved in the formation and recall of memories. Yet preservationists receive no training in this area. A tradition of denigration of the sense of smell can be traced back to the Enlightenment, and there is still surprisingly little serious research on a topic that, on the face of things, might be central to the discipline. In the late 2000s, we took part in a number of experimental preservation projects to test the hypothesis that the smell of historic buildings could be included in the range of material phenomena that preservationists document, archive, interpret, and treat. In 2008, working closely with the National Trust ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
- Headspace: An Interview with Roman Kaiser
- Abstract: Roman Kaiser on the skimmer above the rainforest of French Guiana. Photograph by Kent Lombard. “Headspace” is a chemist’s and perfumer’s expression. It refers to the volume that an olfactory object, be it a flower or trash, occupies with its diffusing scent. It is, therefore, a spatial term, albeit a space that changes size and shape depending on heat, humidity, and the direction of the breeze. “Headspace” also refers to a cluster of technologies—namely a mixture of adsorption techniques, capillary gas chromatography, and mass spectrometry—that allow the sampling and identification of olfactants. The techniques of headspace were pioneered in the 1970s by scientists working in the flavors and ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
- Material and Performance: An Interview with Jacques Herzog
- Abstract: Park Avenue Armory’s Veterans Room, which has been recently renovated by Herzog & de Meuron. Photograph by James Ewing. Courtesy of Otto Archive. The Olfactory Object “Rotterdam” was first presented on the occasion of the relocation of the exhibition Herzog & de Meuron. No. 250 at the Netherlands Architecture Institute in 2005. First shown at the Schaulager Basel in the autumn 2004, the exhibition was then transported nearly a thousand kilometers down the Rhine Rotterdam, and thereafter shipped across the channel to the Tate. The inclusion of the olfactory object, with its notes of Rhine water, hashish, wet dog, and patchouli, was a reference to the characteristic odors of the two cities, as ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
- Preserving the Unpleasant: Sources, Methods, and Conjectures for Odors at
Historic Sites- Abstract: Illustration of a cul-de-sac between tenement buildings from the 1865 Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizens’ Association of New York upon the Sanitary Condition of the City. Physicians thought that tall tenement buildings blocked ventilating air currents and created pockets of stagnant air in which the foul odors emanating from outhouses and poorly drained yards festered. When tenement residents opened their windows for breezes and a breath of fresh air, they instead admitted stenches. Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. On a recent visit to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City, I was eager to experience the type of space I’ve been ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
- Presenting Volatile Heritage: Two Case Studies on Olfactory
Reconstructions in the Museum- Abstract: In 2003 Maria Rosaria Belgiorno discovered a perfume factory dating back to 2000 B.C. The excavation site shows ceramic vessels for macellation and distillation. Source: Wikicommons. Among the senses, olfaction is reputed to be the strongest inducer of associations and historical sensations. State-of-the-art technology and textual sources assist scholars in reconstructing and representing our invisible volatile heritage, offering an extra thread of (sensory) information to both academic and other audiences. However, inhaling a historically meaningful substance doesn’t necessarily lead to a better understanding of the original context and way a scent was once perceived. The hedonic value and ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
- Pattern Recognition: A Background for Carsten Höller’s Smelling Dots
(Portrait of Cedric Price), 2016- Abstract: Portrait of Cedric Price wearing a T-shirt reading “Do it with an architect,” 1977. Credit: Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections. Registering, discerning, and recognizing smell is an intricate process of pattern recognition, which is highly dependent on memory. When we smell something, we actually encounter a complex of different odor molecules, including those already present in the atmosphere (aside from the odiferous object that is our focus). This is to say that a smell is rarely experienced in isolation; in order to recognize a scent, the brain of a sensing subject identifies the resulting pattern of odor-evoked neural activity by filtering out background smells.1 And the brain ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
- The Sacro Monte at Varallo and the Choreography of an Olfactory Landscape
- Abstract: The “Sepulchre of Christ,” with the inscription dated 1491 commemorating Caimi’s work at Varallo placed over the doorway. Photograph by David Karmon. Although most visitors to the Sacro Monte at Varallo, the first “Holy Mount” or pilgrimage shrine founded by the Franciscans in the Italian Alps in the late fifteenth century, now ride to the top of the mountain in a small gondola car, an account published in 1607 by the artist Federico Zuccaro celebrated the pleasures of the slower and more laborious ascent to the summit made by stone stairs carved into the cliff: Monte Varallo is a delight . . . both for the artifice of its many chapels that one encounters while climbing up, and for the ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
- Synthetic Air
- Abstract: Advertisement of the Minneapolis-Honeywell Corporation. From Automatic Heat and Air Conditioning, September 1934. Early in the summer of 1929, the reader of the Saturday Evening Post stumbled across what appeared as a full-page scientific article, proclaiming that, Outdoors the thermometer may climb to humid nineties—yet indoors it can be cool and dry. In winter or in summer, Willis H. Carrier gives to the world in Manufactured Weather the combination of temperature and humidity exactly suited to many industries and to the health and comfort of people. Manufactured Weather is the Carrier name for scientific Air Conditioning by which the air is washed clean of outdoor impurities, cooled ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
- Breathing a Moldy Air: Olfactory Experience, Aesthetics, and Ethics in the
Writing of Ruskin and Riegl- Abstract: Plate II, Part of the Cathedral of St. Lo, Normandy. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 65 Cornhill, 1849). Courtesy Stiftung Werner Oechslin, Einsiedeln. Antiquarian history itself degenerates in that moment when it no longer inspires and fills with enthusiasm the fresh life of the present. Then reverence withers away. [ . . . ] Then we get a glimpse of the wretched drama of a blind mania for collecting, a restless compiling together of everything that ever existed. The man envelops himself in a moldy smell. In “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” Nietzsche evaluates characteristics of three possible modes for engagement with ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
- Neue Sinnlichkeit: Postcritical Issues Regarding an Architecture of
Sensuousness- Abstract: Vals’s gneiss as natural rock, as depicted in the 1996 AA publication Thermal Bath at Vals. On the right is Mohsen Mostafavi’s introduction. Thermal Bath at Vals: Peter Zumthor. Architectural Association, Exemplary Projects 1 (London: Architectural Association, 1996), 4–5. In 1983, the municipality of Vals in Switzerland bought a thermal bath complex, which was located on its territory, but had until then been run by private investors. The latter had not only constructed an indoor and an outdoor pool with an artificial wave machine but also a whole cluster of vaguely late modernist buildings betraying their 1960s construction date, some standing up to ten stories high. These structures ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
- Toward an Olfactory Language System
- Abstract: 1875 Illustration of the olfactory bulb nerve cells by pioneering scientist Camillo Golgi. It is striking that, as a field that has historically been concerned with the material specificity of representation, art has primarily addressed the visual subsection of the human sensorium. When it comes to discerning the underlying material nature of entities in the world—our own human bodies included—vision has some severe limitations: it is limited to entities of a certain (visible) size, and furthermore, is only able to access the surface layer of a given entity. In contrast, an entity’s specific material signature—that is, its chemical structure(s)—is revealed to the human olfactory ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
- Artist Intervention: Olfactive Gulf and Atmospheric Hegemony
- Abstract: In Dubai, there are three hegemonic smells: dust that morphs with the clinical air of air conditioners, the humidity of salty seas that dampens surfaces and fabrics across the city, and oud, or agarwood. The latter is a resinous mold produced in aquaria and gyrinops trees when they are infected (agarwood, more poetically, can be described as the tears of the sick tree). Oud is ubiquitously used in the Gulf—by Khaleejis mainly—to perfume homes, bodies, and public spaces. In the UAE, you could suggest that oud ought to be included in the roster of national emblems, along with the camel, the dala, and the Land Rover, because of its invisible visibility across space in the country. You will find it permeating ... Read More
Keywords: Flowers; Kaiser, Roman,; Herzog, Jacques; Historic sites; Kienholz, Edward,; Cyprus; Perfumes; Smell; Höller, Carsten; Odors; Air conditioning; Air quality management; Odor control; Riegl, Alois,; Architecture; Ruskin, John,; Art; Khalid, Raja'a
PubDate: 2017-05-17T00:00:00-05:00
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