Arakawa + Gins' Bioscleave House in East Hampton, New York used non-orthogonal geometries, undulating floors, and even isolation pods in their experiments to create architecture's that would "stop ageing." Image via Metropolis Magazine. Image Courtesy of Dimitris Yeros, © 2008 Estate of Madeline Gins, Reproduced with permission of the estate of Madeline Gins

触摸、嗅觉、感受：感官建筑
Touch It, Smell It, Feel It: Architecture for the Senses

由专筑网李韧，王帅编译

本文最初发表于“Metropolis Magazine”，标题为“你是否能闻到建筑的气味？多重感官设计简史”。

当说到感官设计，你会想到什么？答案也许很形象，一间雨室、一套时尚餐具、一把质感十足的椅子。但其实来说，物体的感觉、嗅觉、味觉都很难把控，因为人们对于视觉的固有观念根深蒂固，那么其他的感官系统是否能够改变这一观念呢？艺术、建筑、设计的视觉感受是否阻碍了深层次的感官体验？

这些问题正是当前Cooper Hewitt展览“The Senses: Design Beyond Vision”的核心部分，本次展览由Ellen Lupton与Andrea Lipps策划。Lupton 首先问道：“人们之所以去博物馆，因为他们想追求真实的体验，但是人们唯一的感受便来源于视觉，那这是否真实？”本次展览通过78个项目来说明这个问题，这些项目都以感官设计为主要理念，更好地将人们与物质世界联系在一起，并且更加明晰自己的定位。

感官设计在过去10年里逐步流行，其背后的理念最初出现在上世纪50年代欧洲Zero和日本Gutai的激进艺术作品之中。当时的艺术家意识到，有限的视觉感受会影响大众，因此他们将作品的重点放在感官之中，形成深刻的批评形式，直接面对消费主义战后形态的转变。

Zero就应用包含所有感官体系的全新方式，艺术，光线、声音、反射、视差是第二特质，这就好像撞击、切片、焚烧、爆炸等活动也来源于第二特质。Gutai也参与了类似的活动，但是却有些戏剧性，因为在其中常用的道具为大尺度多媒体环境和彩色服饰。

This article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine as "Architecture You Can Smell? A Brief History of Multisensory Design."
What comes to mind when you encounter the term “sensory design”? Chances are it is an image: a rain room, a funky eating utensil, a conspicuously textured chair. But the way things actually feel, smell, even taste, is much harder to capture. This difficulty points to how deeply ingrained the tyranny of vision is. Might the other senses be the keys to unlocking broader empirical truths? Does the ocular-centric bias of art, architecture, and design actually preclude a deeper collective experience?
Such questions are at the heart of the current Cooper Hewitt exhibition The Senses: Design Beyond Vision, curated by Ellen Lupton and Andrea Lipps. “People go to museums because they want an authentic experience with real things, but their only experience is visual; how is that authentic?” Lupton asks. With some 78 projects, the show takes on the idea that sensory design, or consciously designing for the full spectrum of sensory experience, can better connect us to the material world and help us find our proper place in it.
While sensory design has entered popular discourse only in the past decade, the ideas behind it first emerged in the 1950s, in the work of radical art collectives Zero in Europe and Gutai in Japan. Recognizing the limited capacity of sight alone to affect their audiences, these artists directed their work at all the senses. The result was a profound form of critique that confronted the consumerist postwar paradigm shift head-on.
Zero sought an entirely fresh approach, summoning an art that would incorporate a full sensory spectrum. Light, sound, reflection, and optical illusions were second nature, as were live actions such as striking, slicing, burning, and setting off explosions. Gutai followed a similar range of activities but was a touch more theatrical: Large-scale multimedia environments and Technicolor dresses made of light bulbs were common props for equally peculiar performances.


Verner Panton's "Visiona2" exhibition in 1970. The show, which was located in a boat docked on the Rhine, collapsed essential spatial differentiations, such as that between the wall and the floor, to create spaces that would envelop the inhabitant. Image via Metropolis Magazine. Image Courtesy of Panton Design, Basel

在上世纪70年代的曼哈顿，艺术家将感官系统当做政治工具来打破了视觉效果的优势性。诸如Anthony McCall与Doug Wheeler等灯光艺术家受到迪斯科与摇滚乐的影响，从而操控灯光、声音、空间，同时诸如Joseph Beuys、Yoko Ono、Marina Abramović等表演艺术家则构思了“公共事件”，打破了沿街面的白色体块的艺术特征。而诸如John Cage、Gordon Matta-Clark等概念艺术家则记录了沉静的空间，并拆分建筑，解构了人们对于音乐与建筑的偏见。

在80年代与90年代，后现代主义和视觉文化的研究催生了一种对形象的崇拜。，理论家W.J.T. Mitchell记录了“画面的转变”，在此之后画面控制了言语。另外，同样还有诸如La Monte Young与Marian Zazeela于1993年设计的“梦想之家”项目，以及已故日本艺术家Shusaku Arakawa和美国诗人、作家、哲学家Madeline Gins的合作作品，他们都极力反对2D图像的主导地位。越来越多的游客参观了“梦想之家”，在这里霓虹灯结合着乐曲，而缩小的走廊，丘陵状地面、橱柜门正如Arakawa与Gins’ Alice的仙境，这就好像东京郊区Mitaka的Reversible Destiny Lofts。

许多历史作品都通过感官来唤起观众的共鸣，让他们更好地了解社会的政治改革。世界大战和全新反文化运动为曾经的反抗态度奠定基础，而接下来便是后现代主义模棱两可的姿态，新技术的发展也更加明确了当今的抗拒因素。

In 1970s Manhattan, artists disrupted the predominance of vision by enlisting the senses as a political tool. Influenced by disco and rock as much as by activist culture, light artists like Anthony McCall and Doug Wheeler manipulated light, sound, and space, while performance artists like Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, and Marina Abramović produced public “happenings” that broke art out of the white cube and onto the street. Conceptual artists such as John Cage and Gordon Matta-Clark recorded silence and cut open buildings to deconstruct our biases about both music and architecture.
In the ’80s and ’90s, Postmodernism and visual culture studies gave birth to a cult of the image: Theorist W.J.T. Mitchell noted a “pictorial turn” after which pictures controlled language, not the other way around. Still, there were projects like La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s psychedelic Dream House (1993) and the combined practice of the late Japanese artist Shusaku Arakawa and American poet, writer, and philosopher Madeline Gins that fought back against the dominance of 2D. A neon-pink glow synchronized to music followed visitors as they moved throughout the Dream House, while shrunken corridors, dunelike floors, and kitchen-counter doorways typify Arakawa and Gins’ Alice in Wonderland–like Reversible Destiny Lofts in Mitaka, outside Tokyo.
These historical works all used the senses as a means of arousing previously passive audiences, exposing them to sociopolitical shifts. If the hangover of global warfare and a new counterculture set the stage for the original vision’s attitude of defiance, swiftly followed by the tongue-in-cheek posturing of Postmodernism, new technological developments define today’s resistance.


Swiss architect Philippe Rahms Taichung Central Park, also known as the Jade Eco Park, opened September 2018. The park's design relies heavily on the experiential, taking cues from the heat and humidity of the region in which it is located. Image via Metropolis Magazine. Image Courtesy of Philippe Rahm

对于瑞士建筑师Philippe Rahm而言，技术是使建筑回归热量、光线、空气等基础组成部分的重要工具。Rahm认为，城市设计的三要素分别是热量、湿度，以及污染，在去年8月，这位建筑师在台湾设计了172英亩的台中中央公园，在这个项目之中他便运用了这些要素，从而让项目更加适应亚热带气候。建筑师应用的一系列的液体喷淋系统、蒸汽装置形成了特别的景观效果。游客们可以在不同的位置感受到自然的冷与暖。

Rahm说：“钢筋混凝土的发明真正改变了建筑，但是现在全球变暖和可持续化问题正在成为设计的焦点，我们不能再像过去一样生活在充满幻想的世界之中，空间、光线、温度、湿度的不断变化会成为空间中愈发重要的问题。”当前，他正在进行“内部天文学”项目，让家庭重新塑造为具有节能功效的垂直空间。因为热空气能够上升，因此Rahm将诸如浴室等需要温暖的空间放在上部，但是这也不会影响走廊或者卧室的供暖，因为人们在卧室睡觉时会盖上被子。Rahm将科学和身体意识相结合，这种多重感官建筑项目也具有教育意义，让使用者不再为被动的空间困扰，而是主动学习所居住的不断变化的气候。

For the Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, technology is a tool to return architecture to its basic components of heat, light, and air. This past August saw the completion of his 172-acre Taichung Central Park in Taiwan. By harnessing what he refers to as the “three layers of urban design”—heat, humidity, and pollution—Rahm created the park specifically to suit Taiwan’s subtropical climate. A series of liquid-spitting, steam-emitting apparatuses segment and augment the landscape. There are distinct areas for visitors to either cool off (an armature of some kind leverages the cooling wind coming in from the north) or get hotter (another exploits the sweltering humidity brought in from a nearby reservoir by the sea breezes).
“The invention of steel and concrete fundamentally changed architecture, but now global warming and the need for sustainable space are reshaping design,” argues Rahm. “We can’t live in that Miesian open-plan uniform fantasy world anymore, but a heterogeneous space with changing space, light, temperature, and humidity is becoming more important.” His ongoing “domestic astronomy” project rearranges the home into an energy-saving vertical (and thereby anti-Miesian) layout. Hot air rises, so Rahm’s vision keeps areas that require heating, like the bathroom, on the top floor; it also doesn’t bother heating corridors or the bedroom, as residents’ time there is fleeting or spent under blankets. By combining science with a deep awareness of the body, Rahm’s multisensory architecture performs a pedagogical function, wherein its occupants are no longer passive users of space but active learners about the changing climate they inhabit.


Beat Widmer. ImageDiller Scofidio + Renfro's 'Blur Building', which debuted at the 2002 Swiss Expo

纽约Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R)建筑事务所为2002年瑞士世博会而设计的Blur Building，设计师将视觉理解能力的减少设为这座建筑的一大目标。联合创始人Elizabeth Diller说：“为什么不设计一座没有任何看点的建筑呢？我们为什么要依赖视觉？”她和同事在瑞士Neuchatel湖畔建造了一座小建筑，这座建筑位于一片雾蒙蒙的环境之中，因为建筑师应用了35000个喷淋和智能天气系统，这种模糊的景观通过其他感官系统来主导，Diller说：“曾经有个选美团队来到这里，脸上的妆容便花了。”

视觉、窥视、展示等所有感官系统都通过网络科技而得以强调，在DS+R建筑事务所的作品之中尤为明显。但是讽刺的是，该事务所的批评都来源于科技创新自身，这无论是在2012年“The Art of the Scent”的传感器嗅觉体验，抑或是“Post-Occupancy”中楼层之间的无人摄像机，后者是一部正在威尼斯建筑双年展中展出的电影。

这并不是说建筑师就应当把技术看做是砖石，无形的材质是贯穿感官的一大母题。Cooper Hewitt展览通过多重感官的世界来表达亲身实践的乐趣，这个展览包括加州艺术团体Emerging Objects设计制造的3D打印陶瓷，设计师甚至还加入了淡香水，亦或是Kate McLean设计制造的心理地理学城市“气味地图”，设计师精心规划了一场能够记录气味的侦查旅行，另外还有Jinhyun Jeon的耳熟能详的甜品系列，这位韩国设计师的目的是增加品尝布丁的乐趣。

Reducing the capacity for visual understanding was the aim of the Blur Building, designed by the New York–based firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) for the 2002 Swiss Expo. “Why don’t we make a building where there is nothing to see, except our own reliance on seeing?” cofounder Elizabeth Diller recalls asking herself. She and her colleagues built a small structure at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland, only to then conceal it in a thick cloud of fog (created using 35,000 nozzles and a smart weather system). This amorphous, lo-fi landscape necessitated the use of other senses to navigate the space, Diller explains. “There was a beauty pageant group that went through and emerged with makeup dribbled down their faces.”
Vision, voyeurism, and exhibitionism—all intensified by networked technologies—frame DS+R’s practice at large. The firm’s critique of these, ironically, is possible only through technological innovation itself, whether it’s the sensor-mediated olfactory experience of The Art of the Scent (2012) or the omniscient eye of a drone slipping between floors in Post-Occupancy, a new film currently showing at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
That isn’t to say that architects should treat technology as so much brick and mortar. The materiality of the seemingly immaterial is a leitmotif running through The Senses. The Cooper Hewitt show is a hands-on romp through a world of multisensory delights, including 3D-printed ceramics infused with eau de curry by the Californian “maketank” Emerging Objects; Kate McLean’s psychogeographic urban “smellmaps,” created through exhaustively logged smell-finding reconnaissance trips; and Jinhyun Jeon’s much-buzzed-about dessertspoon series, which the South Korean designer devised to enhance the pleasures of pudding.


Kate McLean's "Smell Map" of Amsterdam. The designer joins locals on walks in cities around the world to map the intensity, location, description, and associations of smells around their city. This particular map is on display at the Cooper Hewitt in New York. Image via Metropolis Magazine. Image Courtesy of Kate McLean

随着展品数量的增加，这场展览逐渐变得像一场贸易会，这里充斥着各种新鲜小东西，人们的感官不断受到刺激，但是世界观并没有增大。

相比于主题公园或艺术世界,那些具有偏见的创意性设计概念也许才能引起真实世界的共鸣，这些概念往往具备多重感官体验。DeafSpace便是这样一个概念，它最早于2005年发起于加州加拉德特大学，这是唯一一个面向聋哑人的文化艺术机构，这个机构提出了超过150条形成全新设计语言的概念，例如，光线与色彩是能够提升人们固有能力的材质，这种能力能将人们联系在一起，另外，混凝土外部应该覆盖有木制面板，因为这种材质可以传递震动效果，这样盲人们就能够更好地接受引导。这些概念也促进了加拉德特大学的扩建，该项目将在2019年动工。

有时候，多重感官策略是接近聋哑人的桥梁，但是距离它真正在社会层面中起作用也许还要一段时间。当前而言，诸如虚拟现实和增强现实等感官技术非常普遍，但它操作起来仍然有些麻烦，并且具有一定的排他性。Diller说：“我们在传递一些理念的时候往往会牺牲其他一些东西。但是，一些硬件逐步消失，技术仍然是世界发展的趋势。”

当这些工具不可避免地成为我们日常生活的一部分时，人们是否最终能够脱离先入为主的视觉观念呢？答案并不确定。Lupton说：“技术为感官设计体验创造新机遇，但它同时也能够减少感官的参与。”他认为，即使是最先进的技术，对于盲人而言，使用起来也有一定的困难性。技术是否能够帮助人们提升多重感官的体验呢？这还有待考究。

Yet with the amount of work on display, the exhibition can feel like a trade fair of novel gizmos at times. Visitors have their senses stimulated but exit without their view of the world enlarged.
Far from theme-park gimmickry or art-world antics, innovative inclusive-design concepts—those that challenge biases like ableism—demonstrate that multisensory design has a real-world resonance. DeafSpace is one such concept; first developed in 2005 at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the only liberal arts institution geared toward the deaf and hard of hearing, it puts forward more than 150 principles that form a new kind of design language. For instance, light and color are materials to be embraced for their innate abilities to connect people. Concrete should be covered in wood veneer, which allows vibrations to travel across a space—necessary for the blind in navigating their surroundings. These practices inform the design of Gallaudet’s campus expansion, which is expected to break ground in 2019.
In this instance, a multisensory approach bridges the hearing and deaf communities. It is not overly optimistic to think that it could perform a similar function in other facets of society—and soon. Already, sensory technology including virtual and augmented reality is nearly as ubiquitous as the laptop, even though it remains cumbersome and intrusive. “We transport ourselves optically at the expense of other things,” Diller says. But, she adds, “as the hardware goes away, there will be an inclination to absorb tech into the toolkit we use.”
But when such tools inevitably become a part of our everyday lives, and without the collateral cumbersome distraction, will we finally move on from our valorization of the visual? This is less certain. “Technology is creating new opportunities for designing sensory experiences—but it can also diminish our sensory engagement,” suggests Lupton, who points out that even the most advanced touch screen or VR headset that has no haptic or audio component is useless to a person who is blind. Whether technology helps us achieve a shared multisensory existence or further divides us is yet to be seen (or tasted, smelled, felt, or heard).


Diller Scofidio + Renfro's "How Wine Became Modern" exhibition at SFMOMA in 2010. Image via Metropolis Magazine. Image © Matthew Millman