Design Report

I have a set of well used teak spice drawers which I use whenever I cook at home. They’re special to me both as a beautiful object but also because they’re so deeply ingrained in my experience of cooking. I’ve owned these drawers for probably 20 years so there is no need for labels, I know the contents of each drawer.

Even if I did forget, I could navigate these drawers by smell.

The drawers could be seen as a device for making architecture invisible; when people open these drawers, they always close their eyes in the presence of the aromas. With our eyes closed, we inhale and experience both the smell and the associated memories more deeply. “The nose makes the eyes remember.” [1]

Some of the most important ingredients of architecture are invisible – the aural architecture, what we feel with our skin, and inhale as scents. These all tell us as much about the architecture, if not more, than what we see.

The Tezuka Architect’s studio required a (charming) story of invisible architecture and ‘my own sky’. The walk along the path to my studio outside our house at night became my combined Story of Sky & Invisible Architecture by retaining the scent component of the spice drawers:

“After dinner I leave the house and walk the path to my studio outside, to work. The sounds and smells of domestic life disappear as I wander into the fresh night air.

The house no longer exists in my vision, but I can still catch the faint fragrant smells of perhaps ginger, sesame, lemon, garlic - conjuring up a memory of creating this meal using ingredients from my spice drawers.

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 aromas of dinner drift away to be replaced with scents of the path and the plants along the way.

I could navigate this path by smell.

There is a point between the house and studio, when the trees clear, when I'm not a mother, a wife, but not yet a student or worker, I am just me. I sense the clearing above me and I look up and drink in my own sky.

As the path winds closer to the studio, I can smell the trees and the firewood stacked up here - macrocarpa, pine, tea tree.

Climbing the steps to my studio, I turn the door handle with an aroma of old brass and my journey ends.”

Figure 1: Presentation Model (mid semester critique)

The model I used to tell my story (figure 1) demonstrated the smells along my path - each block of wood was infused with different scents: vanilla and sesame oil near the house; kaffir lime along the path; pine and macrocarpa near the studio. A path which takes you on a journey to experience the outside environment, and smell, were the important elements in the design of ‘invisible architecture with my own sky’. The form of this model also became an influence on the layout of my final design (see cover image & figure 4). A walkthrough of the final model demonstrating the path which goes from the entry to the studio can be seen here.

Smell is the forgotten sense of architecture. Helen Keller aptly describes it as the fallen angel.[2]

Figure 2: Pigpen from Charles Schulz' Peanuts cartoons

A heightened awareness of the importance of non-visual ingredients in architectural space has meant that aural and tactile experiences have been given more credibility, but smell still remains the poor cousin. There is even no accepted way of representing smell in architectural drawings. Traditional representations of odours are weaving lines suggesting a movement from the source to the nose. However, if these methods are used in architecture, it's seen as illustration rather than an architectural drawing (figure 2).

Traditional architecture embraced smell as a contributor to its atmosphere and depth. Buildings were a sanctuary of scent - stone, incense, flowers - a reprieve from cities thick with odours centuries ago. However, the reverse is true now where cities try to be odour- and smoke-free while new buildings contain ingredients for noxious fumes from synthetic materials in the furnishings and construction materials. These are monitored and reduced with the goal of ‘safe’ odour-free architecture. If there is a smell, it must be bad which leads to architecture that is sterile and 'clean'. Modern materials generally result in such odour-free architecture.

If the essence of architecture is intimately linked with materiality, then it's necessary to re-discover the power of architectural scents - the aura of buildings.[3]

Buildings which do have an aroma reveal their materiality, for example:

• Cedar is used to line cupboards and wardrobes as the sweet resinous scent is also a natural insect repellent. In the Imperial summer palace of the Manchu emperors, cedar beams and panelling were left unpainted so the fragrance of the wood could be experienced.[4]
• Floors of Medieval castles were strewn with rushes, lavender and thyme.[5]
• During the Han Dynasty, Chinese imperial concubines were housed in buildings with mud walls infused with Sichuan pepper - the pepper is highly fragrant and also a symbol of fertility still used during wedding ceremonies.[6]
• Builders of Islamic mosques mixed rose water and musk into the mortar - the sun would warm the stone and bring out the perfume, and adding an extra dimension to the flat walls [7].

Smell can be experienced as a design element in the work of Juhani Pallasmaa, Peter Zumthor, and also Charles Moore who designed an interesting house for a blind client.

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 of the space that surrounds us.[8]

More than any other sensation, smell can evoke vivid recall of an entire scene from the past - both the image and the emotions associated with that image. Nostalgic memories of childhood vary significantly depending on when people were born - a study of around 1000 people investigated which smells evoked feelings of nostalgia depending on what decade they were born in[9]:

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, suntan oil, chlorine, scented felt-tip pens

The increasing mention of artificial smells might be a concern if nostalgia for natural odours experienced in childhood is a significant factor involved in our desire to preserve the environment. That is, it could eventually mean that people will no longer have nostalgic feelings for the natural environment, only experiencing nostalgia for smells of manufactured environments.

An additional goal of my design is to provide natural scents as part of daily family life.  Children growing up in this dwelling will, hopefully, remember these scents in the same way I do in the memory of jasmine perfume from the vines my mother planted under our bathroom window.

Taking elements from traditional building methods involving fragrant materials, the main path running from the entry out to the studio in my design will be stone or tiles and unsealed mortar made with either lavender oil (outside the bedrooms) or rosewater (the remaining path areas). The path will be edged with fragrant herbs which release their aroma when walked on or brushed past (see figures 4 & 5). The bedrooms and ‘outside’ toilet will be clad with fragrant cedar cladding, unpainted. Mapping these scents was an important design task though I’m still not satisfied with my methods of representing scents visually as a notation in drawings.

Traditional Japanese building types including the tea house were also important influences in my design. In Tanizaki Junichiro’s essay ‘In Praise of Shadows’, 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." [10]

Figure 3

“[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.”[11]

Tanizaki is not advocating 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 may sound like a Monty Python moment, but in essence it means that each space of the house, whatever its function, should add to the pleasure of dwelling. Not everyone can have a tearoom, but at least more ordinary spaces can be conceived with sensitivity[12]. I could relate to this with memories of the outside toilet at my grandparent’s beach house - the ‘long drop’. It had the same feeling as the walk out to my studio, so my design also includes this feature (albeit a modernised version).

Figure 4: Floor Plan of 36 Airedale Street; level 1 (right), garage level (bottom left), and level 2 studio (top left)

Meditation in Zen practice is an attempt to discover the 'essence' of things through an immediate and intuitive, rather than intellectually constructed, method. I get the impression that Yui and Takaharu were trying to get us to think this way as they challenged us to concoct our stories of invisible architecture and sky in a way that anyone (‘even the old man in the street[13]’) could immediately understand. Their method ultimately involved us all coming to our own conclusions, however frustrating this was!.

Figure 5: 36 Airedale Street, Sections

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York, USA: Random House, 1990.
Benoit, Jacquet & Vincent Giraud (eds). Introduction in From the Things Themselves: Architecture and Phenomenology, 1-16.  Kyoto Japan: Kyoto University, 2013.
Boyle, Sheryl & Marco Frascari. “Architectural Amnesia and Architectural Smell.” AI Architecture & Ideas 9, (2009): 36-47.
Classen, Constance. Worlds of Sense. Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures. London UK: Routledge, 1993.
Hirsch, Alan R. “Nostalgia, the Odors of Childhood and Society.” In The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick, 187-189. Oxford UK: Berg, 2006.
Keller, Helen. “Sense and Sensbility.” In The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick, 181-183. Oxford UK: Berg, 2006.
Junichiro, Tanizaki. In Praise of Shadows. Translated by Thomas J Harper and Edward G Seidensticker. London UK: Vintage, 2001, 9-10.
Okakura, Kakuzo. The Book of Tea. Tokyo Japan: Kodansha International, 1989.
Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin. Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
Zumthor, Peter. Atmospheres. Basel Switzerland: Birkhauser, 2012.
See also my online ‘Sketchbook’ for this design studio at http://rooflessfloorless.blogspot.co.nz/

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[1] Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin. Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2012.

[2] Keller, Helen. “Sense and Sensbility.” In The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick, (Oxford UK: Berg, 2006), 181.

[3] Boyle, Sheryl & Marco Frascari. “Architectural Amnesia and Architectural Smell.” AI Architecture & Ideas 9, (2009): 38.

[4] Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. (New York, USA: Random House, 1990), 60.

[5] Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, 60.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

^[8] Boyle & Frascari, “Architectural Amnesia and Architectural Smell.” 36-47.

^[9] Hirsch, Alan R. “Nostalgia, the Odors of Childhood and Society.” In The Smell Culture Reader, ed. Jim Drobnick, (Oxford UK: Berg, 2006), 188-189.

[10] Junichiro, Tanizaki. In Praise of Shadows. Translated by Thomas J Harper and Edward G Seidensticker. London UK: Vintage, 2001, 9-10.

[11] Junichiro. In Praise of Shadows, 9-10.

[12] Benoit, Jacquet & Vincent Giraud (eds). Introduction in From the Things Themselves: Architecture and Phenomenology, (Kyoto Japan: Kyoto University, 2013), 12-15.

[13] Takaharu Tezuka, during Design Studio sessions.