Algae, vin chaud and tangerine are among the ingredients of Rotterdam, the perfume produced by Herzog & de Meuron to celebrate the exhibition of their work in the Dutch city. The Olfactory Object, as the architects call it, contains hashish, patchouli, and Rhine water, the river that connects Basel to Rotterdam. It is being distributed in a limited edition of 1,000 15-ml bottles. And its strong scent sticks to the skin as tenaciously as images of their works stay in the retina. Jacques Herzog had for years been talking about creating a perfume that would bring to mind “oil paint, wet concrete, or hot asphalt on which it has rained,” fascinated as he was by the capacity of smells to store memory and evoke past experiences or spaces, “almost like an inner film.” The classrooms of our childhood, an old kitchen, or a church during mass are among the places that would be conjured by their olfactory objects, the first of which has been materialized on the occasion of the Netherlands Architecture Institute exhibition, which under the title Beauty and Waste presents a formidable collection of objects, texts, and models illustrating the creative process of the Swiss duo...[+]