Ideas to continue with...to do list

Presentation:

• investigate corridor downstairs
• find out if there is a way of installing some 'stars' on the ceiling that slowly start to glow
• smells - blocks of wood infused with smell
• stuck onto the corridor wall
• made into a vertical model where you have to come close to the wall, close your eyes to smell

Architecture

• path - make the level as a straight(ish) line from entry up to the studio
• rooms then have to have steps up from the path (or down) as they will continue to sit on the original terrain.
• path - slightly uneven, sloping path, terracotta tiles (like a garden path)
• main path has a transparent ceiling, but any other corridors are closed in

Investigations with joins - models

 Leaving slight gaps between each 'block'; differing shapes - round, square

Transparent roof for path:

 

Covered path:

 

  Translucent roof for path:



The poetics of Japanese Space

- taken from: From the Things Themselves: Architecture and Phenomenology, Benoit Jacquet & Vincent Giraud (eds.): Kyoto University Press, Japan: 2013. 12-

"In his famous essay In Praise of Shadows, Tanizaki Junichiro starts by explicating the difficulties faced in building a traditional Japanese house which includes all the necessities of modern life: heating, electric lighting and sanitary facilities. Whilst critical of some aspects of modernization, Tanizaki explains that it should be possible to re-create some the of the synaesthetic feelings inherent in traditional architecture without sacrificing certain modern necessities. For instance, he describes the pleasure felt in the Japanese traditional toilet, as it stands "apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss."

[T]here one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. And the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of seasons. Here, I suspect, is where Haiku poets over the ages have come by a great many of their ideas.

Despite the possibility of catching a winter cold, Tanizaki suggests that; "our forebears, making poetry of everything in their lives, transformed what by rights should be the most unsanitary room into a place of unsurpassed elegance."...Creating the opportunity for the poetic interpretation of space can be considered the root of architectural creation.

...Tanizaki is not attempting to advocate a return to nature or to the architecture of the past, but rather to find inside ordinary life places than can satisfy both his cultural and aesthetic senses. He then points out that in a Nara or Kyoto temple, "the tearoom many have its charms, but the Japanese toilet is truly a place of spiritual repose." This association may seem surreal but an architect can learn from this perspective that each space of the house, whatever its function may be, should add to the pleasure of dwelling. If not everyone can have a tearoom, at least more ordinary spaces should also be conceived with sensitivity.

The tearoom is a space created for the awakening of both the senses and the mind....Based on the model of the hermitage, the tearoom built inside a town would ideally allow "living in town as if living in the country". The hermitage is described as an impermanent construction, a shelter for one night, built by the scholar himself. A tearoom can be built for a special occasion; it emphasises the ideas of immediateness, "here and now", and the intensity of an instant, an encounter than can only happen "once in one's life." This place condenses both time and space around the art of tea in order to enjoy each instant as if it were the last: it shows both an ethical obligation and an aesthetic appreciation of the impermanent values of space and time. The materiality of the tearoom, the natural essence of materials but also the naturalness of their use, also corresponds to this phenomenological approach to space. Everything is made of natural materials, and materials that express a natural essence.

...Meditation in Zen practice is an attempt to  discover the 'essence' of things through an immediate and intuitive, rather than intellectually constructed, method - also the starting point of architectural work.

AD2 Report Writing Workshop - Chris Barton

• 1000-1500 words
• PDF embeded with media as relevant:
• audio
• images
• video - include a walkthrough or fly over of building
• references including references to precedents (what have other architects done to solve these problems).

Path, Scents, Sky

Helpful tips:

• repeat your concept in different ways through the text to emphasise it
• find precendents and mention them (eg. Zumthor, Pallasma)

Main concepts & development of..

• series of individual masses linked by a common path - this path runs right through from the street to the final destination at the end (studio, 'room for thinking', music/library) - path has the same materials from street to studio
• different masses have different scents?
• could navigate this path by smell
• transparent roof for the path, or open to the air, except in the front mass (living/dining/entrance)
• entrance ceiling is lower than the rest, area with steps is semi enclosed (different from the rest of the path)
• forced disconnect with domestic areas, path becomes open in the area before the studio, the transition area
• toilet is accessed from outside as well, to take on qualities of the traditional Japanese toilet plus also the typical older kiwi 'bach' toilet, long drop etc. - with the feeling of being closer to the outdoors/the external environment.
• however, the bedrooms can also access the master bedroom toilet without going outside...(eg. the bedroom nearest the master bedroom could be for young children who do not want to 'go outside' at night)
• light versus dark - day: entrance and studio will be darker than the main pathway - sunny, bright path
• light versus dark - night: brightly lit entrance and studio with no artificial lights on the main pathway so dark, outside will the lighter, look up to sky etc

• cladding = cedar for blocks along the path, stone blocks for front and studio
• path = terracotta tiles with unsealed mortar containing fragrant elements depending on location along the path
• landscaping = fragrant bushes and vines:
• near dining room = Hoya (very fragrant indoor/tropical vine) growing up the wall outside the dining room doors, plus a herb garden for cooking (basil, mint, thyme - thyme planted in between the tiles to walk on).
• near bathroom = ?
• near studio = citrus trees, lemon thyme planted between the terracotta tiles to walk on and release the frangrance, port wine magnolia

Idea to add:

• My site (CBD) is a vast contrast to my original idea for the concept (eg. rural), the challenge is how to recreate this feeling in an urban context

Phrases:

• a main pathway with glimpses of other paths too narrow to negotiate (hints of other routes not possible from here)
• lined with scents evocative of past memories, conjuring up places previously experienced, creating an expectation of what is to come
• delicate scents converge into stronger aromas as the spaces change (become larger and more solid)
• scents of materials help to navitage  - give an indication of where you are and where you are going to/from
• indoor/outdoor/contrast of light/varying geometries
• forced disconnection from the domestic spaces, flinging you into the open night sky with its contrasting sounds and smells, providing an environment supporting the change in mindset needed to study/work/practice
• the main pathways provided contrasting experiences, a transition of scents characteristic of each destination along the path

Building Site & Programme

Programme = domestic house

Fit with concept:

• separate studio/library/"room for thinking"/home office
• path to this involves being 'outside', forced connection with external environment
• path within the house connecting rooms, slight disconnection between the rooms (on levels above ground level)
• fragrant materials to line the rooms (cedar, macrocarpa) and path (scented plants to walk on), fireplace in living area, kitchen somehow allows cooking smells to waft around the house and perhaps downstairs to greet people coming in (place entry stair well near the kitchen)

Brief - family with 2 children

In order to work in the Tezuka style, I'll need to create my own brief, becoming quite intimate with their requirements and reasons behind these requirements.

So, family characteristics (the Di Silva family):

• parents with 2 children - 8 and 10 years old - and a cat
• father works in the CBD, mother does contract work at home so needs an office space
• children both play musical instruments - piano, flute - parents also play the piano
• parents were keen gardeners, but also are used to living in built up cities (eg. Singapore)
• they have lived in may places but the father has built treehouses for 2 houses where the family used to sit and have afternoon tea - he misses those, the feeling of going out of the house into the trees

Site = use original CBD site

This is to fit in with the Tezuka approach where ideas are translated largely into urban areas. This poses more of a challenge for my concept of path and the open/outdoor feeling of the sky.

Address: 36 Airedale Street, Auckland CBD
Land area: approx. 230 m2, approx. 10.5m x 22.5m with a gentle slope up towards the back of the section (fall of about 2.5m). Two storied buildings flank all sides except the street. Views limited to adjacent buildings.

Presentation feedback

"Your ideas are clear and your presentation communicated them clearly, although I think the sky was too small a part of the story - it seemed to get overwhelmed with lots of other less important details.

Your path ahead seems to be quite clear.
The trick for you will be to bring all the various elements - pathway, small and sky - into balance.

So things like proportion, light and materials will be very important. That means physical experimentation and model making will be a very important part of your design process."

Also, for the final presentation make sure the model is up on a high plinth so people don't have to bend down to pick up elements to smell...

Pathway + Smell + Sky

Proportion
- in particular the path in relation to the connected rooms/buildings
Light
- bright-dark-bright sequence
- bright house, dark path, bright destination (night time) versus dark house, bright path, dark destination (day time)?
- small glimpses of sky when moving inside the building but not when static (eg. in corridors & circulation spaces)
- light filtering in between room gaps in walls
Materials
- macrocarpa & cedar linings for rooms/corridors
- scented, fragrant plants lining the path eg. thyme, mint, lavendar, research some more...
- mortar mixed with fragrance eg. rose water + musk in mosques

Concept presentation - aromascape; scents of home

Installation = very simple, relies heavily on non-visual elements.
Studio model at one end, House model at the other, blocks of wood in between representing the smells along the path to the studio.

• pine closest to the house contains vanilla, Worcestershire sauce, sesame oil (dinner)
• kanuka blocks next
• a larger piece of pine with a fresh scent of peppermint to represent the pause in my walk, the middle place where I experience my own sky, the fresh scent of night air in the forest
• next are fresher, younger pieces of pine and macrocarpa, teatree that are in our woodshed next to the studio
• the studio itself smells like the fresh burnt smell of laser cut MDF (model making)

To me, some of the most important elements of architecture are those we cannot see - the things we're often not even aware of like sensing the size of a space and it's materials and temperature. Smell is our most basic sense and one that is not usually associated with architecture.
But it is the one that can conjure up the most powerful involuntary recollections of a place, and the emotions associated with that image.
We can close our eyes and put our hands over our ears but we cannot stop breathing.
Smell enters our body in a breath.

Interviews with blind people highlight the importance of these nonvisual ingredients; one of the most basic is smell.

The path to my studio contains my own sky.

At night I leave our house, after cooking and eating dinner, to walk the path to my studio to work. Our house is nestled down in a valley with trees and birds as our neighbours. There are no street lights or city glow, no city noise.

I leave the house behind me, closing the door, leaving the clatter of dinner dishes, sounds of TV and chatter of my family.

As I walk the path I am in limbo between my domestic life and my student life.
With each step closer to my studio, the smells of cooking waft away to be replaced with the velvety night air with it's fresh smell.

Its dark so my other senses are not distracted by vision, though the night sky and stars start to glow as I move away from the lights of the house.

I could navigate this paths by the scents in the air.

The house no longer exists in my vision, but I still catch the faint fragrant smells of maybe vanilla, ginger, sesame, lemon, or smoked paprika from the meal we sat around the dinning table to eat.

As I walk further though I can only smell the fresh scent of the night air in the trees and perhaps a hint of smoke from our fire.
This is the point between the house and studio,
when the trees clear,
when I'm not a mother, a partner, a daughter, but not yet a student or worker,
I am just me.
This is the time when I always look up at and I drink in the sky, my own sky.

I can't quite see the studio yet but I know it's close, I can smell the wood stacked up next to it. The macrocarpa and pine, tea tree, these smells conjure up images of our lounge with this wood stacked next to our fireplace, my family sitting watching the fire with cups of tea.

Climbing the steps to my studio, I turn the door handle with an aroma of old brass and enter to the smells of a freshly laser cut model.

Video link for presentation http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLxhrp3iLzEuAU_fDrtmdeeWNIZPTsxIXd&v=YAmZ9RXA0E8&feature=player_embedded

Nostalgia, the Odors of Childhood and Society

- Chapter from the book 'The Smell Culture Reader' Jim Drobnick (ed)

More than any other sensation, odors can evoke vivid recall of an entire scene from the past - both the image of the scene but also the enhanced emotional state associated with that image.

Most people can smell 10,000 odors but no 2 people will respond to a particular smell in exactly the same way.
(NB. the most common smell to stimulate memory across all people and cultures is the aroma of baked food.)

Nostalgic memories of childhood vary significantly depending on when people were born - in a study of around 1000 people, odors which evoke feelings of nostalgia were as follows:

People born in the 1920s, 30s, 40s:
flowers, grass, roses, pine, soap, manure, sea air, pine, baby powder, burning leaves, mother's perfume

1960s & 70s:
baby powder, mother's perfume, dad's cologne, chlorine, crayons, Play-Doh, disinfectant, detergent, glue, mothballs, plastic, hair spray, suntain oil, chlorine, scented felt-tip pens

There was an increasing mention of artificial smells...
This is a concern if nostalgia for natural odors experienced in childhood is an important impetus behind our concern to preserve the environment.
It may led to adults who no longer have nostalgic feelings for our natural environment...and who can only experience nostalgic feelings for smells of manufactured chemicals.

Sensory Design

- from the book of the same name by Joy Malnar & Frank Vodvarka

Sensory Cues

p132-
Our sense of smell is not highly valued, nor is odor given any acknowledgement as a design parameter.
Smell is an 'old' sense in evolutionary terms, with few connnections to the left neocortex (our language centres) but many connections to older brain structures which regulate emotion and motivation, including the limbic system, the brain stem and the pituary gland (which through smell, influences bodily function via hormone production).
So, we may not immediately rationalise and explain what we are smelling, but we do have an immediate reaction to a smell and a tendancy to act on it - that is, smelling something generally leads to emotionally coloured and sometimes instinctive actions.

Some notes on our sense of smell:

• Odor sensitivity varies over the course of the day
• Our sense of smell rapidly fatigues (ie. with constant exposure)
• Generally diminishes with age
• Response to odour are not totally objective - they vary individually
• It has a strong ability to invoke an awareness of place - smells remembered after a day tend to be still remembered after a month or a year
• Smell is the sense most strongy associated with memories of a particular time, smells can act as memory aids

Odour can provide otherwise neutral spaces with specific character.

General references for smell...

Alain Corbin's The foul and the fragrant : odor and the French social imagination. 394.10944 C79
http://quod.lib.umich.edu.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;idno=heb01290

CLASSEN, Constance (1993)Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures.London: Routledge

 

- general library call number 152 C61

 

The smell culture reader / edited by Jim Drobnick.

- general library call number 306.4 D78

 

CLASSEN, Constance et al. (1994) Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge .

 

GELL, Alfred (1977)‘Magic, Perfume, Dream...’, in Ioan Lewis (ed.) Symbols and Sentiments: Cross-Cultural Studies in Symbolism. pp. 25-38. London:Academic Press

.

MCKENZIE, Dan MCKENZIE, Dan (1923)Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells. London: William Heinemann .

 

MARTIN, Guy, LAFFORT, Paul MARTIN, Guy and LAFFORT, Paul (eds) (1994)Odours and Deodorisation in the Environment. New York: VCH Publishers

 

VAN TOLLER, S. andDODD, G. H. (eds) (1992)Fragrance: The Psychology and Biology of Perfume.London: Elsevier Science .

 

WINTER, Ruth (1976) The Smell Book: Scents, Sex, and Society. Philadelphia, PA and New York:J. B. Lippincott .

 

WRIGHT, R. H. (1982)The Sense of Smell. Boca Raton, FL:CRC Press .

 

Dennis D. Waskul and Phillip Vannini "Smell, Odor, and Somatic Work: Sense-Making and Sensory Management", Social Psychology Quarterly March 2008 vol. 71 no. 153-71

To do

research odours within construction materials, adding scents to construction materials (eg. mortar, concrete mixes), do some tests on this
gather ideas for site

Architectural Amnesia and Architectural Smell

- taken from an article of the same name by Sheryl Boyle & Marco Frascari in AI Architecture & Ideas 2009, v.9, p.36-47

Smell is our most primary sense. However, smell has never achieved the status of architectural objects - perception led by vision has led to the formal, object-based understanding of architecture to flourish while muting the participation of our other senses.

Anosmia - lack of the ability to smell - dominates current architectural theory.
If the essence of architecture is intimately linked with materiality, then it's necessary to re-discover the power of architectural perfumes and odours - the aura of buildings.

NB ' Aura' - from the Latin 'breeze, wind, air' or Greek, 'breath, breeze' - in this context is a sense of invisible clouds of smells and aromas used to indicate the distinctive but intangible quality surrounding a person or thing.

People recollect odours spontaneously and involuntarily. In architecture with prominent scents, the residents become part of their building - surrounding them. Whether pleasant or not, odour functions in terms of a powerful point in time (kairos) of the space that surrounds us.

Architectural amnesia in this article refers to the loss of the olfactory dimension of architecture; but also a progressive form of loss in education in the teaching of the importance of sensory attributes other than visual. This can be seen via techniques of representation.

Traditional architecture embraced smell as a participant in the depth of the architecture. Buildings were a sanctuary of scent - stone, incense, flowers - a reprieve from the city thick with odours in the 18th and 19th centuries.

However, the reverse is true today where the city has worked to become odour and smoke-free while buildings have become a repository for noxious fumes - new buildings with volatile organic compounds (VOC, from carpet, paints, adhesives, furniture, vinyl) used to be left for 1-2 weeks to complete its off-gassing before being considered safe to move into. While levels of VOC are now monitored and reduced, the resulting goal of odour-free architecture is obvious. If there is a smell, it must be bad which leads to architecture that is sterile and 'clean'. Modern judgement of what materials are appropriate seems to have eliminated all smells from buildings. Glass, aluminium and steel don't release enough particles in the air at room temperature for us to detect any noticeable smell.

Buildings which do have an aroma reveal their materiality:

• cedar is often used to line cupboards and wardrobes as the scent, along with being a fresh sweet resiny smell, is also a natural insect repellent
• In the Imperial summer palace of the Manchu emperors, the cedar beams and panelling were left un-lacquered and unpainted so the fragrance of the wood could be detected
• floors of Medieval castles were strewn with rushes, lavender and thyme which were thought to prevent typhoid
• During the Han Dynasty, Chinese imperial concubines were housed in buildings with mud walls that were infused with Sichuan pepper during construction - the pepper is highly fragrant and also a symbol of fertility (still used during wedding ceremonies)
• Builders of Islamic mosques used to mix rose water and musk into the mortar - the sun would warm the stone and bring out the perfume to create an olfactory experience and adding an extra dimension to the flat walls.

Traditional representations of odours and perfumes are weaving lines of variable thickness suggesting a movement from the source to the nose. NB. see also the cartoonist Charles Schulz' representation of Pigpen. However, if these methods are used in architecture, it's seen as illustration rather than an architectural drawing...

Spaces of Scent (Juhani Pallasmaa)

We need only 8 molecules of substance to trigger an impulse of smell in a nerve ending, and we can detect more than 10,000 different odours. The most persistent memory of any space is often it's smell.
"I cannot remember the appears of the door to my grandfather's farmhouse in my early childhood but I do remember the resistance of its weight and the patina of its wood surface scarred by decades of use, and I recall especially vividly the scent of home that hit my face as an invisible wall behind the door. Every dwelling has its own particular smell of home."

A particular smell makes us unknowingly re-enter a space; the nostrils awaken a forgotten image. "The nose makes the eyes remember"....