Buildings are scent machines. At 40 Mercer, the Jean Nouvel-designed building going up in SoHo, the kitchens are Italian walnut, the backsplashes are heavy-gauge stainless steel, and the air is pungent with the scent of fresh concrete. Then there’s my old tenement in the East 30’s, fragrant with prewar brick, old plaster and sweet, aging linoleum tile. The scent of building materials can indeed be wonderful, so it’s not surprising that some excellent perfumes evoke them. Comme des Garçons’ fascinating, perverse and basically unwearable Odeur 53 smells like paving tar. Azzaro created Chrome for men, an idea based on chilled steel. Technically, it’s possible to make a perfume that someone would actually want to wear based on the smell you get walking past the fresh steel skeleton of the Bank of America at 42nd Street and the Avenue of the Americas, but frankly, I’ve never smelled one. However, there happen to be three scents on the market that, by happy chance, smell like three different building materials, each as fragrant as jasmine and as innovative as jet fuel.
Take Puissance2. Six years ago I renovated an apartment in a 17th-century Parisian building, and as the workmen carried in freshly cut marble and paper sacks of plaster of Paris, I was struck by the awesome scent of the construction glue. In the perfumer Francis Kurkdjian’s unisex fragrance for Jean Paul Gaultier, I’ve rediscovered this scent: rich, weirdly edible (a strong, strange sweetness, as if steaming pasta had been accidentally dusted with sugar), unplaceable yet instantly inviting. It is daring and subtle and refreshingly genderless. And to think I smelled its protozoic form in a fragrant black mixing pail on a dusty French floor.
The smell of wood varies widely. There are the scents of aged beams richly impregnated with time, of brand-new plywood (sheets of wood veneer and glue) and of fresh two-by-fours waiting for drywall. L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Dzing!, a unisex fragrance created by Olivia Giacobetti, the author of Diptyque’s popular Philosykos, is similar to the scent that daily bathes the urban hard hat, with his hammer and nails. I bet this guy never thinks about this complex scent, and I bet he would recognize it instantly. Dzing! plays subtle purity against subtle power; it’s fresh without green (a trick that takes serious perfumer talent to pull off), sweet without sugar (ditto), warm and soft like a plank of newly sawed pine still warm from the blade.
One of the most beautiful scents is that of concrete. The raw, noisy gush of aroma from the cement mixer’s mouth, or the smell of a freshly poured sidewalk hot with summer and wet with rain, is the perfume of the city, and in Christine Nagel and Jacques Huclier’s B*Men for Thierry Mugler, you can smell a fresh 50-story tower being born. Nagel and Huclier have added an extra layer to this urban fragrance; if B*Men is a creamy cement wall, this wall has a French patisserie on one side (caramelized sugar, crusty bread) and, on the other, the rich spice aisle of Kalustyan’s at Lexington Avenue and 28th Street. It’s a terrific perfume.
Future Perfect
By JULIE V. IOVINE
Lobster-claw robots and terry-cloth sport coats by Thom Browne are odd companions anywhere but at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s triennial. This year’s exhibition, the second since its inception in 2000, opens on Dec. 8 and is titled “Design Life Now.” But make no mistake: with its emphasis on new robotic and advanced computer technologies that can produce everything from an interactive Einstein to a fabric with photographic images, this is not just the present but also the future at your doorstep. And while items are arranged into themes (emulating life, community, do-it-yourself design, transformation), the obvious umbrella description would be: Really Cool Stuff. How else to describe a crystal-clear kayak made of the same material used for bulletproof glass, or the plaster ceilings adorned with porcelain flowers by David Wiseman? (He was also commissioned to create a canopy of plaster and porcelain foliage for a doorway between galleries.) “Design is moving back out into society,” says Ellen Lupton, a Cooper-Hewitt curator, pointing to magazines like ReadyMade or to the Web site Howtoons, which was chosen for the exhibition and teaches children things like how to clone themselves using duct tape. The triennial’s 87 American designers, from fields as diverse as landscape and advertising, were selected by three Cooper-Hewitt curators and Brooke Hodge, the architecture and design curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. There’s plenty to seduce the eye, from Abhinand Lath’s shimmering, mood-adjusting fiber-optic floor tiles to the war games designed by the Institute for Creative Technologies in California, a group dedicated, according to its Web site, to forging “a partnership among the entertainment industry, the Army and academia.” Design life, as it turns out, is richer than anyone ever suspected.
