The place of odour in modern aerial urbanism

Abstract

As notions of space in twentieth-century architecture came to replace the traditional architectural concern with air, air was relegated to the purview of the mechanical engineer as a merely technical issue. This narrowing of the idea of air leads us to overlook the richly sentient topic of odour. Odour is often utilised to differentiate between sectors of society, and in the modern bourgeois world the goal became a complete absence of scent, a deodorisation of both person and environment. The Cité de Refuge, built in Paris by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret (1929–1933) provides an excellent case study of modern conceptions and approaches to odour and otherness, air and space. John Evelyn's Fumifugium (1661), continuously republished in the twentieth century, is often misunderstood as an anti-pollution tract. However, it actually advocates a ‘fragrant and odiferous’ urbanism, realising air's contribution to many aspects of living well through its multi-sensorial mediation between the visible and invisible. Evelyn's work provides a counterpoint to the attitudes embodied in the Cité de Refuge, and points towards a rich aero-mantic architecture.The presence of odours is often suppressed in modern urbanism. In 1930, when Sigmund Freud compared the mind to a city, he associated the rise of civilisation with the repression of the sense of smell.1 Olfaction, it has been suggested, occurs in the oldest, most primitive part of the human brain, closely related to instinct and emotion rather than rational thought and language, perhaps explaining why humans lack a large descriptive vocabulary of scent.2 In the pre-modern world, the quality of air was defined by its scent, and air was of fundamental importance to architects; it was concerned with physical health, and with living well more generally. Later, with the rise of interest in space in modern architecture, attention to air dissipated, with a corresponding loss of odour. Yet with smell's powerful connection to memory and intuition, odour remains a subtle base note of urbanism. Le Corbusier's theorisation of air as an early exemplar of modern views and its contrast with the pre-modern Renaissance view of John Evelyn will enable airing out the complex relationship of odour to air and space, in order to understand odour's possible role in the contemporary city.