David Gissen and Irene Cheng, the exhibit's architectural-historian curators from the California College of the Arts, searched far and wide to amass this surreal collection of odors. They tapped into the collections of rock-star perfumers like Laudamiel – who fabricated "Paris 1738" using "cassis note for urine, and [pyrazine] molecules for the other sewage effects" – and solicited tips from odor-obsessed writers like Chandler Burr, the one-time perfume critic forThe New York Times.

Such alternative historical practices were the subject of a recent pair of events held at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, both sponsored by the school’s Masters program in Design Theory and Critical Practices. The first was an exhibition entitled An Olfactory Archive: 1100-1951, curated by David Gissen and designed by Brian Price and Matt Hutchinson, that explored scent as a medium of historical reconstruction.

Manhattan Atmospheres
University of Minnesota Press, 2014
Paperback, 240 pages, $30

From the 1960s to the early 1980s, New York’s great park networks; its sanitarian projects of light, air, and water; and its monumental public works were falling apart. Images of flooded streets, blackened air, collapsed highways, and burning buildings characterize our understanding of the city’s landscape throughout this period. At the same time, architects reimagined interior spaces as a response to these urban disasters. In this book, Architecture faculty member David Gissen reveals this chapter in New York’s environmental history that was unfolding inside the city’s gleaming late-modern architecture.

Gissen uncovers an alternative environmental history by examining the megastructural apartments, verdant corporate atria, enormous trading rooms, and mammoth museum galleries that were built in this era. These environments were integral to New York’s restructuring and also some of the most politicized fabrications of nature found in the city. Behind the tinted and mirrored glass, the vaporous cooled and warmed atmospheres offered protection from pollution, stewarded urban greenery, and helped preserve precious cultural artifacts. But, entangled with efforts to gentrify neighborhoods, the new settings served as a stage for demographic transformations and shifts in cultural concentration and enriched the overall corporatization of the city.

Last month I sat in on the reviews for a Creative Architecture Machines studio exploring the implications of 3D printing—in combination with the Maker Movement, a tech-influenced DIY community. This one was organized at the California College of the Arts (CCA) by professors Jason Kelly Johnson and Michael Shiloh. For the final review, they invited a cast of characters you could probably only assemble in the Bay Area, ranging from architecture nerds to technology geeks, including one Google executive wearing Glas and no doubt recording it all.