Olfactory Odyssey: From Work to Leisure_Jingfei Huang
Production, moderation, and control of olfactory flows can serve to mediate the built environment and programmatic relationships by fostering awareness of the physical and unconscious realms.
Artist Statement
Olfactory Odyssey is an interior renovation project for WeLive, located at 110 Wall Street. Here, a new work-live typology is realized through using smell, which is controlled and designed to tap into the psychological realm and use emotion and imagination to mediate work-live programs. The new type reimagines the old WeLive that was realized using typical, efficiency-driven office design methods characterized by a lack of flexibility and freedom.
The new typology is explored via journeys designed for three prototype users: the financial consultant, the otaku, and the hedonist. Respectively, smell participates in their experience of happy school memories, seaside nights, and a meditative forest journey.
The project assumes that people, like smell particles in the air, can be manipulated to move along designed paths within a space. The olfactory design guides people to circulate through the building, responding to the orchestrated smell trajectories; the architecture participates in the chain reaction of smells that lure people towards leisure experiences, which are accessed through the mind via memories induced by smell.
The new typology is explored via journeys designed for three prototype users: the financial consultant, the otaku, and the hedonist. Respectively, smell participates in their experience of happy school memories, seaside nights, and a meditative forest journey.
The project assumes that people, like smell particles in the air, can be manipulated to move along designed paths within a space. The olfactory design guides people to circulate through the building, responding to the orchestrated smell trajectories; the architecture participates in the chain reaction of smells that lure people towards leisure experiences, which are accessed through the mind via memories induced by smell.
Project Description
This project consists of a network of space that produces and activates smells to further affect users’ movements within an existing building and is intended to mediate and reconfigure work-leisure balances for the building’s inhabitants through olfactory phenomenological means.
Olfactory Odyssey is an interior renovation project, which is located at 110 Wall Street, WeLive to establish a new work-live typology through smell. The old WeLive which represents typical efficiency-driven office design, lack of flexibility, and freedom to echo emotions or imaginations. The office environment needs a proper transition toward a leisure environment to prepare people for an immersive experience in leisure; and, smell, as a neglected sense in architectural design, can reconfigure the interior environment to help the guests to connect to their own personal memories of leisure.
Smells in the building are constructed through a series of “chemical reactionsâ€. They are decomposed from certain images into specific elements that capture leisure activities. Each smell element is produced in an inserted apparatus that plugs at the core of the building between work and live space. I treat each element as each performative step in a Rube Goldberg machine in that each element is separated and distilled in each chamber but overall, they form a larger continuous olfactory phenomenon. This would help the explorers to have a healthy and fun journey between work and leisure, meanwhile to restore a healthy relationship between them.
The new typology is explored via journeys designed for three prototype users: the financial consultant, the otaku, and the hedonist. Respectively, smell participates in their experience of happy school memories, a meditative forest journey, and a summer seaside journey. Journeys consist of units producing smell elements. Each unit produces a genre of smell based on the properties of smell on its distance and direction as well as how people interact with it.
The olfactory design guides people to circulate through the building, responding to the orchestrated smell trajectories. This project assumes that people working nearby would be attracted to enter the building and start their one-night journey to transfer from work state to a leisure state. It assumes that people, much like smell particles in the air, can be manipulated to move around the building without viewing the source of smells. By alluring people to follow the smell flows and finally to reach the final destination of leisure which is producing this smell, the architecture allows people to participate in this chain reaction of smells and increase their awareness of the immediate environment and build up nostalgic leisure images step by step. After archiving leisure, the users would be able to participate in producing smells, i.e. leisure, for other people.
For example, for the financial consultant, he would be allured by the home-cooking smell first to be out of the office. Following the food smell, he would go through library smell as well as fresh-cut grass smell to be refreshed and then go through sweaty smell and chalk smell to re-experience school memory. After this, he would be refreshed by juice smell and then go to the garden smell to complete the image of one-day school leisure. For the otaku, in order to let them leave the “leisure†room. They are forced to leave by releasing skunk smell into their room and go through the lawn, sunshine, sand, and sea smell to establish an image of summer seaside night. For the party people, in order to let them establish a healthy schedule of life away from all-day parties, they would be guided through gardens and sunshine to get inner peace. As a result, the occupants with their original tags would wash their work state to be ready for leisure state when they go through these journeys.
Changing the smell environment is forcing people to rethink architecture, to shift the focus away from a purely visual and functional approach towards one that is more sensitive, more attentive to the invisible, olfactory and even nostalgic aspects of space. On a large scale, olfactory odyssey explores the atmospheric and poetic potential of architectural space and techniques for ventilation and heating. At the microscopic level, it plumbs novel domains of perception through smell.
Between the infinitely small of the physiological and the infinitely vast of the meteorological, architecture must build sensual exchanges between body and space and dynamic vibrant space which is constantly changing to better respond to the relationship among body, time, and place.
Olfactory Odyssey is an interior renovation project, which is located at 110 Wall Street, WeLive to establish a new work-live typology through smell. The old WeLive which represents typical efficiency-driven office design, lack of flexibility, and freedom to echo emotions or imaginations. The office environment needs a proper transition toward a leisure environment to prepare people for an immersive experience in leisure; and, smell, as a neglected sense in architectural design, can reconfigure the interior environment to help the guests to connect to their own personal memories of leisure.
Smells in the building are constructed through a series of “chemical reactionsâ€. They are decomposed from certain images into specific elements that capture leisure activities. Each smell element is produced in an inserted apparatus that plugs at the core of the building between work and live space. I treat each element as each performative step in a Rube Goldberg machine in that each element is separated and distilled in each chamber but overall, they form a larger continuous olfactory phenomenon. This would help the explorers to have a healthy and fun journey between work and leisure, meanwhile to restore a healthy relationship between them.
The new typology is explored via journeys designed for three prototype users: the financial consultant, the otaku, and the hedonist. Respectively, smell participates in their experience of happy school memories, a meditative forest journey, and a summer seaside journey. Journeys consist of units producing smell elements. Each unit produces a genre of smell based on the properties of smell on its distance and direction as well as how people interact with it.
The olfactory design guides people to circulate through the building, responding to the orchestrated smell trajectories. This project assumes that people working nearby would be attracted to enter the building and start their one-night journey to transfer from work state to a leisure state. It assumes that people, much like smell particles in the air, can be manipulated to move around the building without viewing the source of smells. By alluring people to follow the smell flows and finally to reach the final destination of leisure which is producing this smell, the architecture allows people to participate in this chain reaction of smells and increase their awareness of the immediate environment and build up nostalgic leisure images step by step. After archiving leisure, the users would be able to participate in producing smells, i.e. leisure, for other people.
For example, for the financial consultant, he would be allured by the home-cooking smell first to be out of the office. Following the food smell, he would go through library smell as well as fresh-cut grass smell to be refreshed and then go through sweaty smell and chalk smell to re-experience school memory. After this, he would be refreshed by juice smell and then go to the garden smell to complete the image of one-day school leisure. For the otaku, in order to let them leave the “leisure†room. They are forced to leave by releasing skunk smell into their room and go through the lawn, sunshine, sand, and sea smell to establish an image of summer seaside night. For the party people, in order to let them establish a healthy schedule of life away from all-day parties, they would be guided through gardens and sunshine to get inner peace. As a result, the occupants with their original tags would wash their work state to be ready for leisure state when they go through these journeys.
Changing the smell environment is forcing people to rethink architecture, to shift the focus away from a purely visual and functional approach towards one that is more sensitive, more attentive to the invisible, olfactory and even nostalgic aspects of space. On a large scale, olfactory odyssey explores the atmospheric and poetic potential of architectural space and techniques for ventilation and heating. At the microscopic level, it plumbs novel domains of perception through smell.
Between the infinitely small of the physiological and the infinitely vast of the meteorological, architecture must build sensual exchanges between body and space and dynamic vibrant space which is constantly changing to better respond to the relationship among body, time, and place.