Real and Constructed Nature
When I was 7, we spent a week in Paris. Our hotel room was at the top of a rickety flight of stairs, all dark wood and simple furniture. There was a sloping roof with a skylight that was low enough for me to reach. Throwing it open when we first entered, I looked out and over hundreds of busy rooftops in the slanted evening light. I drew a breath and inhaled the smell of hundreds of dinners: caramelized onions, simmering butter, roasting garlic and velvety mushrooms. The soft evening air was saturated with it and I was transfixed, filling up my seven year-old lungs as fast as I could. Paris was full of food, and so was my room.
Smells are invasive. They assault you in the street or creep up on you in a moment of solitude. No matter the approach, there’s no way to not smell them. As I write this, there is a breeze blowing in from the back door of the coffee shop. It smells of the crisp fall evenings that taught me to love the Northeast. It’s distracting because I want to be outside. It’s distracting because I’m used to my well-regulated environment of interior coffeeshop noises, dim lighting and warm coffee smells. This upstart breeze has no business being here, and yet I am transported by it. I am so used to controlling everything in my life that I’ve forgotten how it feels to just have things happen to me. I’m like the controlling female protagonist who has just met the free-spirited love of her life.
Somewhere in our history we began to protect ourselves from the external world. I imagine the history of dinnertime smells: a caveman inspired by the scent of food from the next cave decides to eat at the same time, and the concept of set mealtimes is born. A younger New York could be mapped by the different cuisines of each neighborhood. And today: a woman opens up a container of chicken curry in a Metronorth compartment and everyone groans.
Delos Living is a Manhattan real estate firm that is creating sustainable, health-centric luxury homes. Their apartments purify water and air, provide a circadian lighting system (whether the apartments have actual windows is unclear), and soundproof the residents even from their own footsteps. Fortunately, the insulation is soy-based, so you know it’s good for you.
In a vibrant, smelly and loud city like Manhattan, Delos’ new apartments are attracting a lot of attention. What I want to know is, what happens when you leave your bacteria-free haven and step out on to the street? Does increased sustainability mean that we shield ourselves from the world we are trying to protect? What does it mean when the idea of biophilia - the bond between humans and other living systems - is reduced to designing offices with a view to ensure better performance and blood pressure metrics? Where is the space for our nature and our humanity?
There is something so romantic and contextual about the smells and sounds of a place. The sound of a train in the night to remind you of the movement of time. The smell of salt water to bring you back to the first time you read Moby Dick. The sound of crickets chirping that I replicated with an app on my phone all summer in New York, only to find the real thing outside my window in New Haven. I think we forget that we are subject to something larger than ourselves sometimes, and we need to be reminded how alive we are.