#smellscapes

#smellscapes

Lachlan Turczan's practice sits in the space between physics, optics, and environmental art, as he works with lasers, water, mist, and custom-built lenses to produce sculptures made entirely from light.

The original intent of pilotis was to create a sense of lightness that would allow circulation and light to flow beneath a structure, but contemporary requirements render thin columns insufficient for large-scale civic projects.

The brain processes aesthetic experience like other rewards, such as food or money, indicating that the appreciation of beauty is deeply rooted in our neurological responses.

Viewpoints are structures designed for observing the landscape from elevated positions. They act as devices that organize the gaze and establish a direct relationship between the body and the territory.

When you design your home with intentionality, you are essentially 'hard-coding' healthy behaviors into your daily rhythm. Health outcomes are the result of thousands of micro-decisions—so in his own home, he prioritized spaces like the kitchen, whose open layout makes cooking a pleasure, and the gym, centrally located.

For most of human history, night arrived as a planetary certainty. Darkness spread across landscapes, and the sky revealed thousands of stars. Today, that sky is disappearing. Artificial light spills upward from cities, scattering through the atmosphere and turning night into a permanent haze. Research mapping global sky brightness shows that more than 80 percent of humanity now lives under light-polluted skies, and the Milky Way has vanished from view for over a third of the world's population.

Unlike sight or sound, smell has a direct pathway to the amygdala and hippocampus-the regions involved in emotion and autobiographical memory. Because of this connection, memories triggered by scent are often more vivid and emotionally intense than those triggered by sight.

The contemporary technology museum has emerged as a performative participant in the systems it seeks to document. The architecture of these institutions has become increasingly fluid and bold, often mirroring the velocity and complexity of the systems it houses. They operate as mediators between the human, the ecological, and the technological realms, transforming from encyclopedic warehouses into active educational engines.

Decades of research in environmental psychology and building science reveal that indoor conditions can profoundly affect human health and behavior. Lighting influences circadian rhythms and sleep patterns. Air quality impacts cognitive performance and respiratory health. Temperature and acoustics shape comfort and concentration.

It's kind of crazy, but I just get ideas all the time. I genuinely thought: wouldn't it be cool if you could borrow scents like books? And would that work? Would people do it? Would they just think it was stupid? So far, no one seems to think it is stupid.

Beauty, it turns out, is capable of launching not just an armada of ships, but a cascade of the same feel-good chemicals you get from being in love, eating chocolate, exercising, and having orgasms- dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin. It also lowers stress, blood pressure, and heart rate.

Being an incense obsessive myself, it's important to note that while there's a loose parallel with the sticks you light at home, incense colognes are far more malleable and dimensional. On the skin, incense becomes an atmosphere built from resins and woods that shifts and evolves with your chemistry as it diffuses throughout the day.

I first became aware of fragrance layering while traveling in the Middle East, where it is deeply rooted in perfume culture, and after talking with people and friends from the region who shared their knowledge with me. After launching the brand, many customers started to ask me how to layer Maison Crivelli perfumes altogether, and I started to look at the different combinations which could work well.

One scientist at MIT, Cyrus Clarke, is working to do just that. Alongside a team of fellow researchers, Clarke has developed a physical machine called the Anemoia Device, which uses a generative AI model to analyze an archival photograph, describe it in a short sentence, and, following the user's own inputs, convert that description into a unique fragrance. The word "anemoia" was coined by author John Koenig and included in his 2021 book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

"Me and my girlfriend went on color hunting in Berlin this weekend," user Erikas Mališauskas shared on X. "We picked two random colors and had to make a 3×3 photo grid featuring that color. I got yellow, she got blue, here's the result." Commenters rallied together in agreement, saying how good of an idea this is.

At a time when memories are increasingly flattened into folders, feeds, and cloud backups, a new experimental device from MIT Media Lab proposes a far more intimate archive: scent. Developed by Cyrus Clarke, the Anemoia Device is a speculative yet functional prototype that translates photographs into bespoke fragrances using generative AI, inviting users not to view memories, but to inhabit them through the body.

Though they're individually tiny, parking spots quietly play a dominant role in shaping urban landscapes. Most US cities dedicate at least 25% of their developable land to them. Some, even more. That land usage doesn't only determine the way a city looks. It also means covering large swathes of urban areas in heat-absorbing asphalt, which contributes to making summers hotter and heightens the risk of flooding since it prevents drainage during storms and heavy rainfall.

Cities around the world share a common goal: to become healthier and greener, supported by civic infrastructure that restores ecosystems and strengthens public life. The question is how to reach this. Global climate targets, local building codes, and municipal standards increasingly guide designers and planners toward better choices. Still, many cities struggle to translate these frameworks into everyday, street-level comfort and long-term ecological protection.

Previous research has shown that people feel better in bird-rich environments, but Christoph Randler, from the University of Tubingen, and colleagues wanted to see if that warm fuzzy feeling translated into measurable physiological changes. They rigged up a park with loudspeakers playing the songs of rare birds and measured the blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol levels (a marker of stress) of volunteers before and after taking a 30-minute walk through the park.