Smell This: The History of Architecture, Told Through Scent

The San Francisco exhibition, put on by the college’s Architecture Division, comprises reconstructed scents meant to evoke particular times and places. Contributors include architect Jorge Otero Pailos, whose perfume recalls Philip Johnson’s Glass House; and perfumer Christophe Laudemiel, with an olfactory reflection on the Strait of Bosphorus during the Middle Ages.

“[S]mell is often maligned by aesthetic criticism as too ephemeral, too fleeting, to substantiate anything meaningful,” Amelia Taylor-Hochberg writes. “But what if it opened the nostrils and minds of the sniffers to imagine architectural space in a new way, or represent a place’s atmosphere as it once was?”