Aromatopia

Definition

Aromatopia is Jim Drobnick's coinage for the engineered totality of the senses — smell included — as museum effect: "The use of smell as part of the 'five senses experience' – or what I call 'aromatopia' – gives the impression that an exhibition is a comprehensive, fully embodied encounter," drawing on "the literary conception of the five senses (prevalent for the past two millennia) to convey the feeling of a complete, total, and all-encompassing nature" (p. 92). Employed "mostly by living museums and populist entertainments with a quasi-educational agenda," aromatopias draw their power from the word's own architecture: aroma plus -topia, a place made of smell, promising totality.

The concept carries a double critique. On one side, the rhetoric of total experience "is nothing but a gimmick" in some cases — "a Madame Tussaud's exhibit supposedly featuring 'the smells of London' consists merely of theatrical smoke in the Chamber of Horrors" (p. 92). On the other, better-intentioned cases (living museums: "you can see and touch clothes as they were in the sixteenth century… smell Tudor herbs") set up expectations that "require examination, as spectacle and myth collide with education and history" (p. 92). And the saturation programme has an institutional-political edge: synthetic scents "demonstrate an institution's hipness towards multimedia and sensory-saturated viewing environments; they prove a vivid marketing tool; and serve as a quick fix for the image of the museum so that, despite the multiple crises challenging its credibility, it can avert self-scrutiny and structural change" (pp. 91–92).

Drobnick's constructive claim is that aromatopias are heterotopia's olfactory kin: "Like Foucault's 'heterotopia,' aromatopias are sites of polyvalency where orthodox behaviours are shed and alternative possibilities temporarily inhabited. The intensity and diversity of smells demarcates the museum's experience as decidedly 'other' – one olfactorily coded to be outside the routine of the ordinary and everyday" (p. 92). The -topia suffix is thus earned: smell is the medium that codes a place as other.

Key Thinkers

• Jim Drobnick — the concept's author (Volatile Architectures, 2002/2006): aromatopia as saturation, gimmick, and otherness-production.
• Michel Foucault — the named comparator: the heterotopia as "site of polyvalency" whose logic aromatopias enact olfactorily.

Related Concepts

• Heterotopia — the explicit model: "Like Foucault's 'heterotopia,' aromatopias are sites of polyvalency"; the smell-coded 'otherness' of the museum visit.
• Heterosmia — the sibling coinage: engineered saturation vs. unintended commingling; both postmodern smell-regimes against anosmia.
• Olfaction — the parent concept: smell as architecture's neglected sensory dimension; aromatopia as its populist-institutional form.
• Simulation / Hyperreality — the critique context: "While critiques of simulation and the hyperreal have proliferated in regards to audio and visual media, little attention has been devoted to the synthetic, postmodern uses of smell" (p. 92); aromatopia's synthetic scents as hyperreal smell.
• Spectacle — the collision: "spectacle and myth collide with education and history" (p. 92); the quick-fix image function averting institutional self-scrutiny.
• Everyday Life — the otherness-claim: the aromatopia is "olfactorily coded to be outside the routine of the ordinary and everyday."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the concept's founding text (pp. 91–92): the five-senses totality; the Madame Tussaud's gimmick; the living-museum programme; the heterotopia comparison; the marketing quick-fix critique.
• Touch, Taste, Smell (Brown 2018) — the concept's built cases and its dialectical completion. The living-museum register Drobnick named is confirmed at Old Sturbridge Village: the living-history museum where visitors handle authentic artifacts (1790–1840) and "villagers" demonstrate everyday tasks — the touch-side of the "you can see and touch clothes as they were in the sixteenth century" programme, with the same promise of total, period-immersive encounter. And the concept's open question — whether aromatopia "can escape its populist confinement… and become a high-art curatorial strategy" — is answered by The Art of Scent (Museum of Art and Design, New York, 2013): scent presented in a design museum as "a true artistic medium rather than just a consumer product," twelve commercial fragrances (Chanel No. 5, 1921; Untitled, 2010) stripped of "extraneous characteristics" in a Diller Scofidio + Renfro gallery — the engineered-scent programme in minimalist dress, scents "specially modified to resist sticking on skin or clothes." Whether this is the aromatopia's emancipation or its most sophisticated marketing quick fix ("a vivid marketing tool… a quick fix for the image of the museum") remains the concept's live tension. See smellscape, multisensory-museum.
• Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the concept's architecture-scale cousin: the grotto as the built form of the aromatopia logic. "Natural or artificial, sacred or profane, the grotto is an event space, not a place of quotidian habitation. It is not only a place outside the normal condition, but also a place that envelops its occupants in its own cosmology" — the same "outside the routine of the ordinary and everyday" coding Drobnick attributes to the aromatopia, achieved by total sensorial environment (water, coolness, verdant air, smell) rather than by synthetic scent. Bienvenidos al Sur's thicket — "The diffused boundary modulates moisture, light, air, smell, and sound… This literal manifestation of biophilic design aims to embrace nature in design for all the senses" — is the five-senses totality built as a pavilion. The comparison also sharpens Drobnick's critique: the grotto's totality is engineered too ("orchestrated sprays and splashes") — is the biophilic aromatopia an engineered enchantment like any other? See artificial-grotto, interior-cosmology, olfaction.
• source-notes/perec-2006-the-apartment

Open Questions

• Is aromatopia a heterotopia or its parody — does the smell-coded otherness survive repetition and habituation, or does each visit re-anosmize the senses (needing escalating saturation to re-mark the museum as 'other')?
• Is the five-senses totality a phenomenological achievement (the fully embodied encounter the headnote demands) or its simulacrum — the "impression" of embodiment rather than embodiment itself?
• Can aromatopia escape its populist confinement (living museums, theme parks) and become a high-art curatorial strategy — or does the art museum's claim to seriousness require smell to remain unacknowledged?