Volatile Architectures

Author: Jim Drobnick Year: 2006 (Intimus reprint; original publication 2002) Source type: chapter Raw file: raw/chapters/drobnick_2006-volatile-architectures.md

Summary

Jim Drobnick — artist, critic and curator, working here the year before his Smell Culture Reader — rehabilitates Walter Pater's dismissive phrase "volatile effects" as the name for an olfactory approach to architecture. Where Pater used "volatile effects" to deny architecture's artistic potential (its spiritualities "felt rather than seen" can only "lurk about architectural form"), Drobnick's volatile architectures are "literally fragrant, pungent, or reeking" — the aromatic dimension of buildings, neglected by architectural theory, as a real and significant experiential register. The text (published in Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos, 2002; excerpted in Intimus, 2006, pp. 89–95 under the editors' headnote) surveys the "curious development" of smell in the postmodern museum through four perspectives — heterogeneous stimulation ("heterosmia"), sensory saturation ("aromatopia"), artificial authenticity effects, and strategic, context-specific intervention — arguing that countering the primacy of the visual reconfigures the museum experience both perceptually and politically, opening it to marginalized, private, everyday experiences (typically those of women's domestic labour) and to "the dynamic realm of becoming rather than the static domain of being." (First published 2002; the date field follows the wiki's reprint-volume rule for Intimus selections. The raw file's header reads "Intumus: Interior Design Reader" — an OCR corruption of "Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader," and "Juleanna" of Julieanna Preston.)

Key Claims

The white cube's anosmia relegates architecture to the visual (editors' headnote): "the transcendent formality of the white cube gallery, in its pollution-free pristine state, relegates architecture to a purely visual state"; "the lack of aromatic smell provides less than full or lived body experience" (p. 89). Opening the interior to the full range of senses "counters visual primacy and recognises that colour and smell have significant effect on our perception of space and objects" (p. 89).
Pater's dismissal inverted into a method: Pater used "volatile effects" to dismiss architecture from the aesthetic — architecture, "the most concrete and utilitarian of arts," can only let its spiritualities "lurk about architectural form as volatile effects, to be gathered from it by reflection" (p. 89; quoted via Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 1992, p. 60). Drobnick appropriates the terms: for Pater they were metaphorical, gathered "by reminiscence and reflection"; his volatile architectures are "vividly sensorial and experiential – they are literally fragrant, pungent, or reeking" (p. 89).
Architectural theory's neglected sense: "The aromatic dimension of buildings is one that has been for the most part neglected in architectural theory, yet the volatile effects created by odoriferous materials, ventilated scents, and other wafting perceptions can significantly influence one's experience of a structure" (p. 89).
The public already demands smell: press reviews mourn olfactory absence — the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's psychedelic-era exhibit ("There's not a whiff of patchouli oil in the place. It smells like school") and the Canadian Centre for Architecture's 'The American Lawn', whose display technology was praised but whose "fragrance that is so much a part of the 'lawn experience' is missing" (p. 90). The audience question: does today's audience expect "the museum to provide a sensorially complete experience – to counteract the anaesthetized routine of everyday life?" (p. 90). Andy Warhol, "an enthusiastic perfume collector," envisioned a "museum of smells" thirty years earlier (p. 90).
Clive Bell's olfactory revolution in museum philosophy (1913): Bell derided the "museum atmosphere" that "asphyxiated visitors" and called for blowing "out of the museums and galleries the dust of erudition and the stale incense of hero-worship" — by olfactory metaphor advocating direct experience of emotion over scholarly sycophantism, inclusivity and democratization over expert mediation (p. 90). From the 1980s, amusement parks, living history sites, heritage centres and science museums infused exhibitions with smells "for reasons remarkably similar to the ones Bell articulated" — intense immediate sensations, accessibility, personal interactive engagement (pp. 90–91).
1. Heterosmia — the postmodern museum's condition: postmodern museums are defined by heterogeneity — "ambiguously defined spaces, ones that combine multiple functions and behaviours" — having appropriated elements "from theme parks, malls, boutiques, food courts"; aromas from restaurants, cafés and gift shops "cross over the threshold and permeate the inner sanctum of artistic worship" (p. 91). "'Heterosmia,' a preponderance of smells from disparate sources, is my term to signify the condition of the postmodern museum. This is in contradistinction to the anosmic condition of the conventional museum." Heterosmia is not sought but structural — "an unintended result of the mixing and close juxtaposition of previously separated activities," consequent on decisions about "real estate, tourism, audience attendance, and the desire to transform a specialized institution into a one-stop, multiple-interest entertainment package" (p. 91).
2. Aromatopia — sensory saturation: diffusion technology and synthetic-chemistry advances made scent "one of the most fashionable additions to the museum's repertoire of effects": synthetic scents "imply a certain power over nature, over history, over the limitations of visual artifacts," prove a 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). "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 five-senses conception "prevalent for the past two millennia"; its rhetoric of total experience can be "nothing but a gimmick" (Madame Tussaud's "smells of London" is "merely theatrical smoke in the Chamber of Horrors") (p. 92).
Aromatopias are heterotopian: "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). But multi-sensory reliving sets up expectations "as spectacle and myth collide with education and history" (p. 92).
3. The authenticity problem — and its ocularcentrist bias: smells are used to "artificially heighten the 'realism' of the viewing experience, affirm the 'authenticity' of objects" — the Museum of the City of New York scents facsimile documents to smell 'old'; the Smithsonian diffused garbage and urine smells for an inner-city exhibit; Disney rides use synthesized odours to reinforce virtual realism (p. 92). "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). Drobnick's counter-critique of the critique: "It is inconsistent to single out smells just because they are artificially produced (that is, mediated), or variable in interpretation, and not also critique other museum information that is mediated or variable; this would basically undermine the entire museological enterprise. The mutability of smell frustrates a quasi-authoritarian demand for the systematized deployment of 'correct' meanings and experiences. The distrust of the sensual has a long history in Western culture, a distrust which can be distilled into a contest between representational and presentational modes of information" (p. 93). Selective smell-critique is "a circuitous defence of ocularcentrism" (p. 93).
The stronger case is against synthetic smells specifically: "Instead of confirming the authenticity of a certain experience, fake smells distort olfactory discrimination and sever the ability to connect odours to their natural sources" — the disciplining and training of the senses, "presumably one of the museum's goals," is sacrificed (p. 93).
4. Strategic intervention: context-specific presentation of scent "still holds a potential to reconfigure the museum experience": as museums abandon master narratives and prescriptive interpretation, extra-visual sensory experiences "grant heightened status to the subjective nature of knowledge production, and foreground experiences that are partial and uncertain. Authority and coherence are guaranteed not by collections and curatorial directives, but by each visitor's experience" (p. 93).
Performance over consumption (via Tracy Davis): "Physical engagement… activates museum goers to 'perform' rather than 'consume' the content"; visitors negotiate "the tension between the museum's framing ideology and the immediacy of personal experience"; disparate sensory information may "foreground difference and contradiction – effecting a museum experience that is interrogative, temporal, pluralistic" (p. 94).
The political register — gender and the everyday: "Countering the primacy of the visual opens up the museum to behaviours, activities, and identities that are not necessarily Western, privileged, and masculine, and which fail to produce collectible artifacts. Marginalized, private, or everyday experiences, such as those typically associated with women's domestic labour, can be given distinction and value" (p. 94, following Gaby Porter's feminist museology).
Olfactory realism at the limit — the Holocaust Museum's Shoe Exhibit: intellectual horror "is compounded by olfactory confirmation," where the odor of decomposing shoe leather "cannot be obliterated by even the most energetic air conditioner… [T]he shoes' odor invades visitors' bodies and in so doing cements concept to experience" (Davis, quoted p. 94). The smell operates "on a micro-sensory level in order to trigger a cognitive appreciation for ideas way beyond the reach of mere historical verisimilitude"; it is "a signifier in excess of language, one that is unexpected, unhyped" (p. 94).
The dynamic conclusion: "For exhibits to go beyond the visual presentation of objects, and engage with the other senses, is to venture into the dynamic realm of becoming rather than the static domain of being" (p. 94).

Connections

Concepts: olfaction · heterosmia · aromatopia · white-cube · atmosphere · heterotopia · heterogeneous-space · simulation-hyperreality · exhibitionary-complex · spectacle · perception · embodiment · lived-body · everyday-life · postmodernism · interactive-architecture · spatial-agency · gender-and-the-interior · aesthetic-body · representation

Authors: Jim Drobnick (author) · Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston (editors of the reprint volume; their headnote frames the selection) · (discussed, not source authors: Walter Pater — see log; Clive Bell; Tracy C. Davis; Kevin Walsh; Constance Classen, David Howes & Anthony Synnott; Andy Warhol; Anthony Vidler — transmission of the Pater quotation)

Debates: static-vs-dynamic-architecture — the closing dynamic/becoming claim · ornament-vs-purity — the Crime and Ornament context; the white cube's "pollution-free pristine state" as the purity position's museum-form

Related source notes: Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the other Pater in this wiki: Colley's aesthetic body vs Drobnick's volatile effects · The Architectural Uncanny (Vidler 1992) — the conduit for the Pater quotation · Architectural Atmospheres (Borch ed. 2006) — quotes Drobnick's own Smell Culture Reader essay on olfactory manipulation · Symbiotic spaces (Stokes-Rees 2018) and The Museum as Destination (Skot-Hansen 2018) — the museum cluster

Direct Quotes

"the transcendent formality of the white cube gallery, in its pollution-free pristine state, relegates architecture to a purely visual state" (editors' introduction, p. 89)

"Architecture which begins in a practical need, can only express by vague hint or symbol the spirit or mind of the artist … [T]hese spiritualities, felt rather than seen, can but lurk about architectural form as volatile effects, to be gathered from it by reflection." (Walter Pater, quoted p. 89; via Vidler 1992, p. 60)

"Contrary to Pater's denial of architecture's artistic potential, I would like to appropriate and rehabilitate such 'lurking' sensations, 'vague hints' and 'volatile effects' as precisely the terms that can be employed to describe an olfactory approach to architecture." (p. 89)

"In contrast, the volatile architectures I will discuss below are vividly sensorial and experiential – they are literally fragrant, pungent, or reeking. The aromatic dimension of buildings is one that has been for the most part neglected in architectural theory, yet the volatile effects created by odoriferous materials, ventilated scents, and other wafting perceptions can significantly influence one's experience of a structure." (p. 89)

"This process of opening the interior to the full range of the senses counters visual primacy and recognises that colour and smell have significant effect on our perception of space and objects." (editors' introduction, p. 89)

"'Society,' he suggested, 'can do something for itself and for art by blowing out of the museums and galleries the dust of erudition and the stale incense of hero-worship.'" (Clive Bell, quoted p. 90)

"What Bell was advocating by means of olfactory reference was a revolution in museum philosophy, one that privileged the direct experience of emotion over that of scholarly sycophantism, that favoured inclusivity and democratization over mediation and intimidation by experts, that permitted visitors to make their own decisions and judgments rather than accepting the dogma of tradition." (pp. 90–91)

"'Heterosmia,' a preponderance of smells from disparate sources, is my term to signify the condition of the postmodern museum. This is in contradistinction to the anosmic condition of the conventional museum." (p. 91)

"Advances in aroma diffusion technology and the chemistry of synthetic compounds have led to scent being one of the most fashionable additions to the museum's repertoire of effects." (p. 91)

"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." (p. 92)

"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)

"Reliving the smells of a medieval town or pioneer homestead sets up expectations that require examination, as spectacle and myth collide with education and history." (p. 92)

"Perhaps the most problematic employment of smells is their use to artificially heighten the 'realism' of the viewing experience, affirm the 'authenticity' of objects and secure the 'legitimacy' of the representations of other historical periods or cultures." (p. 92)

"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. 93)

"One can certainly fault profit-oriented museums for recycling the same olfactory sensations in dissimilar contexts, but at what point does this critique emerge from a latent bias against the olfactory? And to what degree is it a circuitous defence of ocularcentrism?" (p. 93)

"It is inconsistent to single out smells just because they are artificially produced (that is, mediated), or variable in interpretation, and not also critique other museum information that is mediated or variable; this would basically undermine the entire museological enterprise. The mutability of smell frustrates a quasi-authoritarian demand for the systematized deployment of 'correct' meanings and experiences. The distrust of the sensual has a long history in Western culture, a distrust which can be distilled into a contest between representational and presentational modes of information." (p. 93)

"Instead of confirming the authenticity of a certain experience, fake smells distort olfactory discrimination and sever the ability to connect odours to their natural sources." (p. 93)

"Authority and coherence are guaranteed not by collections and curatorial directives, but by each visitor's experience." (p. 93)

"Physical engagement, argues Tracy Davis, activates museum goers to 'perform' rather than 'consume' the content; that is, visitors are inserted into that indeterminate domain where they must individually negotiate the tension between the museum's framing ideology and the immediacy of personal experience." (p. 94)

"Countering the primacy of the visual opens up the museum to behaviours, activities, and identities that are not necessarily Western, privileged, and masculine, and which fail to produce collectible artifacts. Marginalized, private, or everyday experiences, such as those typically associated with women's domestic labour, can be given distinction and value." (p. 94)

"[I]ntellectual horror at an already familiar narrative of recent genocide is compounded by olfactory confirmation in a gallery where the odor of decomposing shoe leather cannot be obliterated by even the most energetic air conditioner … [T]he shoes' odor invades visitors' bodies and in so doing cements concept to experience." (Tracy C. Davis, quoted p. 94)

"The fleshy smell of the shoe leather is a signifier in excess of language, one that is unexpected, unhyped." (p. 94)

"For exhibits to go beyond the visual presentation of objects, and engage with the other senses, is to venture into the dynamic realm of becoming rather than the static domain of being." (p. 94)

"The problem is compounded by the fact that one begins to wonder if Victorian streets, Medieval universities and Viking villages were all steeped in the same, obviously-artificial, chemical-odour version of wet cats." (Kevin Walsh, quoted p. 93)

Open Questions

Drobnick's defence of smell (the ocularcentrism charge against Walsh) vs his own concession about synthetic smells: is the line "artificial smell in context" or "synthetic replacing actual" — and who decides when diffusion is strategic intervention versus marketing quick fix?
Is heterosmia a condition of institutions or a designable resource — can heterosmia be curated, or is it by definition the unintended commingling that curation fails to police?
If aromatopias are heterotopian "sites of polyvalency," does the smell-coded otherness survive scale and habit — do visitors habituate (the anosmia returning), and does the museum then need escalating saturation?
The essay closes with the dynamic realm of "becoming" — how far can the museum-as-experience argument extend to buildings: is volatile architecture a theory of architecture or a theory of exhibition display?
Pater's volatile effects were "gathered… by reflection," Drobnick's are "literally fragrant" — but the Holocaust Museum case shows smell doing reflective work ("cements concept to experience"). Can smell be both presentational and representational at once?