I now realise the great historians of architecture have all sold themselves short. They looked at buildings too much. They never thought to sniff the places they wrote about, not realising that old buildings literally reek of history. But now we may be approaching a new age of nostril-quivering architecture whose designers draw a breath, having thought about the smell of the places we live in.
“Smell is our oldest sense,” says Chandler Burr, curator of the department of olfactory art at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the first museum to exhibit scent as a historic art form and where the show The Art of Scent runs until February 24 2013. He’s in good company: Nabokov said that “nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it”, and we’ve all experienced how our olfactory systems can instantly recall the fug of a school dining hall or your mother’s powder-puff.
This happens because a combination of volatile chemicals, or “odorants”, as well as some proteins and hydrocarbons, having landed on the mucus of your nasal passages, are transferred via helpful neurons to the mitral cells of your olfactory bulb situated behind your eyes. Suddenly, those memories are fresh in the mind but – wonderfully – nobody has yet figured out exactly how the brain finally processes and expresses smells.