Sense of Smell

This week, I explored the sense of smell and how it contributes to making places. I visited Victoria Market and walked all around the various zones, the bakery, meat market, and the fruit and veggie market. During the visit, I made some diagrams that explain what I experienced during the visit.

 

My first diagram is about the different odors I was able to smell in the bakery area. Through the size of the rectangles I was able to portray the intensity and the common-ness of the smell. In this case, cheese and olives were the more powerful scents, where are orange juice was the least powerful.

 

The next diagram is about the location of the smells in the bakery. I drew a small plan for the entry of the bakery and marked out where the different smells one encounters wen first entering the bakery come from.

 

The third diagram is about the "big hit" one gets once they enter a space. As soon as you enter the bakery, there is a strong smell of cheese, and when you enter the fruit and veggie market there is a rich smell of herbs until you get closer to the meat market entrance, and once you enter the meat market, you smell the overwhelming odor of raw meat and fish.

My fourth diagram shows the different smells I encountered in the meat market. Raw meat and fish, garbage, sweet chili, marinades, and dips are the main smells within the space.

My last diagram is about the smells within the fruit and veggie market from the bakery door til the meat market entrance. The odors I could smell were herbs, rock-melon, mango, oranges, cigarettes and garbage.

After the visit I made a wire model about the ideas I got from the diagrams. The concept I am trying to portray through my model is that a combination of various smells creates an overall experience that a person can usually associate with a particular space. The coloured wires represent the different smells in a space, and the silver wire wraps up the odors into an experience.

Sense of Sound

 This week I had to explore how another sense could be used as a tool for place making, the sense of sound. The sounds I documented were at Federation Square during an open cinema day.

 

The diagram above shows the main areas where sounds would project. The number of rings on each space shows the magnitude or the loudness of the sounds in that particular area. These main areas were the TV screen, the trams, the cafe and restaurants, and the chattering of people.

 The next diagram unpacks the types of sounds that exist within a particular space, a seating area next to Flinders and Swanston Streets.

The third diagram shows the wavelengths, speed, and consistency of the sounds. Here, I have documented the sounds of a tram, the TV screen, and the chattering of people.

 

The fourth diagram recorded the speed of the sound of the pedestrian crossing.

 

My last diagram was about documenting the sounds within the interior of the Federation Square exhibition space. The sound that stood out to me the most was the sound of footsteps, and so I decided to document the sound of footsteps in this sketch. My findings show that the footsteps on the ground sound more quiet and there is less of a "thump" compared to when there are footsteps on the stairs. The model I have made this week represents the concept of this final diagram.

 This week the model was made from plaster. Here, I am trying to show that the footsteps higher up on the stairs are louder and have more power compared to the more faint footstep on the ground floor. I tried to convey this idea by making a bigger and taller footstep on the stairs and a shorter and smaller footstep on the ground.

Sense of Site

To explore how the sense of site can be used for place making, I went to Bowen Lane in RMIT University to see how the different parts of the site was being used in different ways and the creating 5 diagrams about my observations.

The first diagram shows how people would gather throughout the site. The little circles shows where the pockets of people would use the site the most; the more concentrated the circles, the larger the groups of people.

The second diagram conveys that the people in the site would use the space under or around trees the most. The more the leaves on each tree (in the diagram), the more those trees' surrounding space was used.

The third diagram documents the movement through out the site. Since the diagram is a lane most of the flow of people was as though they were simply passing through the space. Another major space with lots of movement was the area in front of the RMIT Cafeteria.

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This diagram shows the different temporary activities that occur throughout the space, flyer handouts, food stalls,chalk messages, and retail stalls. The area these activities were most evident in were in front of the RMIT Cafeteria. However, the chalk messages were usually displayed on the walking pathway and the flyer handouts were also located around the entrances and exists of the lane.

 

The final  diagram documented where people parked their bicycles the most throughout the site. The bicycles were mostly parked  by the entrances and of buildings and the lane way. But was it only due to the act of placing bike racks near the entrances?

  

 

Next, I made a model that conveyed the ideas that have come across in my diagrams. This week, the material I used was paper/card. Through this model I tried to explain how the different main zones within the site drew different numbers of people in the site because of the activities that take place in those specific zones. The circles would represent the zones (for example, the basketball court, the grass courtyard, the park-like area and the area in front of the RMIT Cafeteria); the cones represent the pockets of the people (the thicker the cone, the larger the group of people)

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