New Aesthetics for House and Workspace. From the War Against Smells to the Search of Perfumes

The sense of smell has long been expunged from aesthetic reflection. Although we could refer to Condillac and the famous example of the statue that comes to life starting from the sense of smell, the French philosopher himself believed that smell was the poorest sense of determination, the one that least contributed to developing the contents of knowledge (Bonnot de Condillac, 1746). For this reason, in the history of aesthetics, studies on smell remained a step behind those on sight. It was even worse for architectural aesthetics since architectural theories developed around the primacy of the eye that observes space and in centuries when cities fought odors (Milizia, 1781). The treatises on Civil Architecture, which were based on the Enlightenment Aesthetics, are characterized by a reference to hygiene and solutions to fight odors: they are part of what Alain Corbin, in Le miasme et la jonquille (1982), called “deodorization” of the XVIII and XIX centuries.