In the novel, Süskind is more successful than any author before him in enticing the reader into the world of smell. But although Perfume has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has recently been made the subject of a film, the topic of our olfactory perception of locations, people and objects has been relegated to something of a wallflower in contemporary literature.
Anna Barbara and Anthony Perliss have now taken a new look at the subject in their book Invisible Architecture, an attempt to retell the story of human culture and its reflection in architecture in the light of our olfactory perception and smells both fragrant and putrid. If we are to believe their thesis, smells held (and still hold) a truly evolutionary significance.
Prehistoric man’s development from quadruped to biped marked the physical removal of the human nose from the ground and out of reach of its multiplicity of odours. And even more recent cultural and technical history can be interpreted, according to the book, as a gradual extinction of the odours which used to surround us. In contrast to materials like wood, straw and clay, the majority of building materials used today fail to exude any appreciable odour. Instead, a domesticated fragrance is deliberately manufactured in every area of interaction between people – from the perfume we wear to attract a partner to the ‘government standard bathroom malodor’, a weapon devised by the US Department of Defense to engender an immediate flight response in the enemy. Instead of providing a chronological step-by-step treatment of the topic, Barbara and Perliss have broken down the book into seven chapters with titles such as Emotions and Rites, Identity and Memory, and Bodies and Distances. They also invited five perfumiers and five architects to meet with them on location to talk about places with unusually close ties to certain smells – for instance in the catacombs and in the ‘Atéliers Hermès’ in Paris, in New York’s Meatpacking District, in a Dutch windmill or the Giardino dei Semplici in Florence.
Although the fact that the chapter Death and Entropy takes pride of place at the beginning of Invisible Architecture does make for a somewhat unappetising entry into the book, mention of cesspits, human sacrifices, chemical warfare and rotting food should not put off would-be readers from venturing on through the remaining chapters. Invisible Architecture is a true roller-coaster ride through five millennia of olfactory history; although the narrative sequence may come across as somewhat confused, every new twist and turn brings with it new discoveries about a topic that, without doubt, has been under-represented in historical narrative to date.
Even the tricky question of how to illustrate a book about the olfactory sense has been cleverly solved by the authors using whole-page photographic plates of living rooms, cult sites and city squares, locations and non-locations from around the world that have been treated with fine, subsequently applied fragrances to give off a waft of odour. While the use of this type of technique can undoubtedly easily slide into the realms of gimmickry, in Invisible Architecture the degree of subtlety with which it is used contributes towards making this book a thoroughly successful all-round art work.