Often, it is the traces of human activity that define our smellscapes. At Sandbanks Provincial Park where thousands of tourists gather every summer on its beach flanked by one of the world’s largest freshwater dune systems, visitors’ activities are defined by materials like the hot-vinyl aldehydic sweetness of inflatable toys, or the soapy plasticky styralyl acetate from the nylon of abandoned chairs. Along the water’s edge, we smell the benzyl salicylate commonly found in sunscreen and used by perfumers to conjure sun-warmed skin. I walk further along the beach. A forgotten orange inflatable ring burrows in the sand like a giant crab. All smells convey memory, even the most prosaic and plastic among them. When summer is at its driest and winter is at its coldest, the shoreline scents of limestone, bleached dunes and grasses grow quiet — either hibernating in the cold air or overwhelmed by more volatile compounds under the hot sun. They are olfactory catalysts as the wind and rain interact with them. They also support algae interfacing with rock, sand with shells, balsam with sunscreen and hamburgers, and the many people with nearly everything they touch. Combined, they form a palette — mineral, marine, green, resinous, synthetic — and it is this palette that drives my own work as a perfumer seeking to transcribe the weather and shoreline into a memory deeper than any visual reckoning. I’ve built an upside-down perfume organ in my house to organise the hundreds of vials needed to recreate memories of landscapes. For example, there is Calone, a synthetic molecule invented in 1966 that came to define the marine perfumes of the ‘90s like L’Eau d’Issey, that recreates the life aquatic of Lake Ontario. Floralozone, Adoxal and Hivernal recreate the lake air. Seaweed absolute, Oakmoss with a trace of dimethyl sulfide for the algae. Violet leaf, Stemone, cis-3-Hexenol and Triplal round out the vegetation. Composing with them is a form of site documentation. If the beach holds plastic, the accord holds an aldehyde. If we want to bring in the traces of sun-warmed sand and skin, we might add a musky Habanolide and airy Hedione to make the shoreline feel bodily, immediate, inhabited. Memorable. Landscape holds memory even more than buildings do. Studying a shoreline through one’s nose reveals a deeper memory of ourselves — walking the dunes, the forest, or the beach with our lovers, by ourselves, or as the children we once were. These edge conditions are where the lake negotiates with the land, and the present with what it cannot help remembering. I moved here to live inside that negotiation. *
IAN CHODIKOFF is an architect and emerging perfumer. He is an advocate for the architecture profession and leads a consultancy helping architecture firms with business strategy and communications. Ian lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.
Salina Kassam
Ian’s perfume organ under the stairs where vials of scents are collected, evaluated and mixed.
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on site review 49 :: shorelines
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