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SMELL - A NEGLECTED SENSE IN ARCHITECTURE

Architecture News - Jun 19, 2008 - 17:39   14433 views

Every surrounding smells. The one, the reader of this paper, experiences at the moment of reading also has an odour. Every human being breathes approximately 30,000 times per day. 30,000 stimuli per day and yet almost no architect contemplates these as an intrinsic creative aspect of architecture.  There is excellent academic work done examining unpleasant or hazardous smells as one cause of Sick Building Syndrome {SBS} and service engineers and other specialists increasingly incorporate the results within their discipline to prevent negative influences. However, there is no academic work to explore the meaning and the positive possibilities of odour in architecture. It is the aim of this paper to initiate a debate on this particular aspect of smell.  There is vast material on the temporary use of volatile oils and other odorants deriving from esotericism, hardly scientific and quite often painful to read. However, aromatherapy is nowadays widely accepted for its benefits for human physiology and psychology , but no paper considers either the interaction of odorants with their direct surroundings or the odour of a building itself. This might be due to incomplete understanding of the sense of smell; but with the enormous efforts carried out in brain research an understanding of our senses has started to appear in the sphere of scientific knowledge, too. Neurophysiologists need to understand the sources of information in order to understand its processing within the brain. Despite the concentration on vision in a visualised world, some remaining secrets of smell were uncovered very recently and together with the improved knowledge of the human brain, this embodies one objective of this paper, namely to explore the role of odours in our daily surrounding.    The Homo olfaciens is a product of biological as well as cultural evolutions and thus the examination of the cultural significance of smells will be another approach to understand its significance for architecture. Endless examples of the occurrence of odorants in architecture in a vast variety of cultures make a complete monograph impossible. Various different disciplines must combine to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the cultural background of odours in architecture, yet little work has been done till now. Despite our incomplete knowledge and the complex nature of this issue, examples will yield conclusions about the nature of this phenomenon and will underline the importance of scent architecture. The term scent architecture is capable of many readings. This thesis will going to employ scent architecture in the sense of architecture, built according to the contemplation of smell as one out of five senses perceiving buildings. Scent architecture can be divided.
www.raven-partners.de/ak_smell.htm