Sensory studies arises at the conjuncture (and within) the fields of anthropology • sociology • history • archeology • geography • communications • religion • philosophy • literature • art history • museology • film • mixed media • performance • phenomenology • disability • aesthetics • architecture • urbanism • design

Sensory Studies can also be divided along sensory lines into, for example, visual culture, auditory culture (or sound studies), smell culture, taste culture and the culture of touch, not to mention the sixth sense (however it might be defined)

Sensational Space: Architecture and the Seven Senses

Sensational Space: Architecture and the Seven Senses
April 21-24, 2010
A panel chaired by D. Medina Lasansky, Cornell University
Society of Architectural Historians, Chicago, IL, USA

Abstracts of Papers

“Jewish Bodies, Christian Senses, Urban Spaces”
Laura Hollengreen,  Georgia Insitute of Technology

Apart from manifestations of sanctity, experience of sexuality, and conduct of war, nothing stimulated the sensory imagination of medieval Christians as much as the Jew.  Building on work I’ve presented elsewhere on the spatial and, in particular, the urban aspects of medieval Christian-Jewish interaction—in examples from eleventh-century Mainz, twelfth-century Rouen and Oxford, and thirteenth-century Chartres—I propose in this paper to extend my study by incorporating detailed information about the Jewish quarters of other medieval cities (probably Paris, Norwich, York, and one German city).

The medieval Christian sensorium was often depicted as assaulted by Jews—Christian hearing was outraged by Hebrew chant, sight confused by unmarked Jews, smell offended by noxious odors, taste deceived by wet nurses’ milk, and touch sullied by Jewish hands working for profit or other evil.  At the same time, the “spectral Jew,” as defined by historians like Stephen Kruger, was produced precisely by the effacement of real Jews.  Focusing on a small set of urban case studies, I seek to locate and to measure the conjunction of historical (including archaeological) evidence of Jewish-Christian contact on the one hand and literary/artistic testimony on the other.  Preliminary conclusions are that although the homes of Jews were regarded as particularly dangerous, that is where most small loans by Jewish moneylenders were contracted; that the protection of person and commerce afforded Jews by lords’ castles was subject in unpredictable ways to the political relations between Christian elites; that synagogues and other Jewish ritual structures were typically modest in scale and sometimes all but invisible to Christian eyes; and, perhaps most tellingly, that Jewish offense to the Christian sensorium emanated so forcefully from a fundamentally corporeal conception of Jews that it lingers as much in records of public streets and squares as it does in evidence about specific buildings.  Not surprisingly, medieval Jews frequently evinced what I have termed an “agora-aversion”.

In short, I seek to understand more precisely what was the relationship between a sensorial imaginary and the material artifacts that have traditionally been the focus of architectural historians.

“Olfactory Aspects of Ottoman Mosque Architecture”
Nina Ergin, Koc University

Already during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime in the seventh century, a pleasant smell became an important aspect of communal worship in the mosque, as mentioned in his collected sayings and deeds (hadith). For instance, once during congregational prayer Muhammad noticed the body odor of a group of believers who worked in menial jobs and traditionally wore heavy woolen garments; he told them to wash and perfume themselves before prayer, so as not to disturb fellow worshippers. As the Ottomans were upholders of Sunni Islam, they emphasized the continuation of such practices.

The smellscape of sixteenth-century Ottoman mosques can be partially reconstructed based on documents preserved in different archives in Turkey, in the form of the charters specifying the conditions of the endowments responsible for the administration and upkeep of the mosque complexes. These charters routinely mention the employment of a buhurcu or buhuri, a person who perfumed the mosque on Fridays and other holy days. Using the case of the buhurcu as a springboard, I will discuss the types of smells and perfumes that worshippers could sense inside the mosques—such as the prayer rugs’ wool, the wooden Qur’an stands and chests, the mosque lamps fueled by olive oil, the plants in the garden surrounding the mosque, the water in the mosque courtyard, and the aroma of the food served in the soup kitchens often attached to larger mosque complexes.

As this case-study will demonstrate, for Ottoman patrons sponsoring mosques as well as the worshippers visiting these monuments, the olfactory experience within the mosque space was an essential and openly acknowledged aspect of the multi-sensorial experience of the divine, to borrow David Howes’ expression.

“The Haptic Sensorium of the Moscow Metro”
Tijana Vujosevic, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The  Soviet avant-garde architect, Moisei Ginzburg (one of the designers of the NarKomFin communal house,) wrote in 1934 that Le Corbusier, in the tradition of Western architecture, ultimately did nothing but revolutionize visual form. In his book “Housing” he claimed that Soviet architecture had to be more radical than that. It had to be concerned with “visually tactile perception,” with manipulating sensations of coldness, of warmth, of smoothness, of roughness, of “solidity of color.” It had to become more than visual. It had to become haptic.

It was not a communal house that was the first site of radical Soviet architecture. I claim that it was a monumental State sponsored project, the centerpiece of the Second Five Year Plan – the
Moscow Metro, opened on May 14th 1935.  The Metro was not only a manifestation of State sovereignty and the power of workers to transform the world, but also a utopian sensorium
burrowed underneath the Soviet capital, a world of electric lighting, smooth movement, polished surfaces, and intricately veined marble.

I will try to explore the ways in which the Soviet subject of the First Five Year Plan, the metropolitan mass, was rendered present, in which the body of the masses, the socialist esprit de corps was materialized in the architecture of the Metro. I will draw on the popular mythology of the Metro, architects’ reports and daily newspapers describing the urban wonder in order to find resonances between the ethics of the great enterprise of social reconstruction, ‘stroika,’ and the aesthetics of the Metro as a haptic sensory regime.

“Groping in the Dark ”
Sandy Isenstadt, University of Delaware

Historians have long acknowledged vision as the privileged mode of perception in the modern world, both as sensory mode and arbiter of reality. Yet, vision itself is subject to significant historical change. The spread of electric lighting in the early twentieth century, for instance, brought a new intensity to visual experience as well as a new self-evidence to underpin the superiority of sight. In an architectural context, electric lighting was a challenge to professionals who saw the dignity of their designs upended by frivolous lighting installations. Flickering reflections could dwarf carefully coordinated masses, dissociate building surfaces from underlying structure, thereby perceptually eclipsing material conditions with effects unique to the physics of light and entirely indifferent to tectonics. For most people, however, electric lighting was sensational. Brighter and more continuous than earlier gas lighting, electric lighting was also instantaneous: an individual could radically alter his or her visual environment “at the flip of a switch,” a phrase that conveyed a new power to alter the visual field at will and thus create an unprecedented volitional space. The speed with which such expectations regarding the illumination of everyday life were assimilated is evident in the anxieties that accompanied occasional blackouts. Experts from a wide range of fields, including medicine and education, worried about a new inexperience with night vision in a well-lit world, and explored ways to maintain essential services should lighting systems fail. As the Washington Post put it in 1941, city dwellers, long accustomed to bright lights, would, in a blackout, “have to learn to see all over again.” They would have to revert to other senses, such as hearing and touch, that commentators claimed had atrophied with disuse. This paper will focus on those moments when spaces newly brightened by electric light suddenly went dark.

“The Soundscapes of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building”
Jack Quinan, State University of New York at Buffalo

Although the Larkin Administration Building is widely regarded as a major monument in the history of architecture over the course of a century critics and historians have objectified the building by dwelling upon its exterior and interior visual and spatial characteristics and the robust expression of its mechanical functions.  I propose to re-examine the Larkin building in terms of the sonic conditions that existed both outside and within the building.  Wright’s charge was to shut out the conditions of the exterior environment in order to create a clean, air-conditioned, well-lit, fire-proof, and spacious, work environment for the approximately 1,800 mostly female office workers and the supervisory hierarchy of this prominent soap and mail order operation.

I will first examine the sound, smell, and polluted air conditions of a surrounding industrial landscape that teemed with railroad lines, trolleys, factories, grain elevators and stockyards. Then I will explore the ways that Wright positioned and designed the building to combat those conditions.  Attention will be paid to the deeply recessed entrance, the tiered approach stairs, and the sound and suggestive impact of its accompanying waterfall fountain.

The building’s sealed interior presented an entirely different set of sonic conditions dominated by the collective sound — a kind of magnified “white noise” — of fifteen hundred typists at work that was interrupted regularly and on special occasions during which the central light court functioned as an auditorium for speakers and musicians. We will examine how Wright anticipated  the reverberant nature of the hard glazed brick, steel and glass surfaces of the interior and the experience of the building will be recreated based upon interviews and documents from persons who worked there, including Evelyn Heath, M.D., daughter of a Wright client,  who was employed there in 1910 after graduating from Vassar.

Discussant:  Alice Friedman, Wellesley College