Architecture is a multi-sensory experience. When we engage architecture it engages us in passive (subconscious) and active (conscious) ways, altering our perceptions of a space, building, site, or city. We see architecture: as we move in space-time architecture visually shifts its symphony of material, light, shadow, form, mass and void. We hear architecture: the reverberation, dampening, and amplification of audio, objects, and people signal human occupation. We touch architecture: we connect with the qualities of surfaces while walking or brushing up against a wall. We smell architecture: sometimes spaces are olfactorily blank and sometimes space is a suffocating olfactory buffet for better or for worse. We typically don't taste architecture, taste being excluded from architectural experience, but architecture continues to reinvent itself in parallel with technological development and programmatic necessity. Perhaps one day we'll eat our way through an edible building.

When we occupy architecture, it engages at least three of our senses, enhancing, dulling, or supporting cues, perceptions and actions. These senses become neatly packaged into a sensorial bundle - an aggregate that forms individual perception of an architectural element or space with one sense dominant at any given moment. When we attend a lecture, we watch, listen and feel (air, temperature, tile or carpet) within the context of an educational function. Here, architecture accommodates the act of learning. There are infinite ways architecture can support and express this. Learning doesn't just happen in a lecture hall or auditorium but in informal spaces outside of educational forms and norms. A concert can take place in a living room or a stadium - the difference is equally experiential and spatial.

Architecture creates sensorial spaces by default. Regardless of spatial function, if it is occupied by a living, especially sentient, being, architecture will do its sensorial job. Architecture is weird: if there is no live occupant or being engaging with at least one sense, architecture is not at play, but what matters more is the extent that architecture acts on sensorial effect. Does it play it up or play it down? Is it intentional or accidental? Paradoxically, architecture can even be working when it's not even apparent or physically extant: the light radius of a street lamp defines the limit of visibility and safety - a circle of protection. The cone of light projecting onto a dark street is a volumetric delineation of both space and safety. Light is a sensorial architectural "material".

In order to properly affect human senses in new and engaging ways, architecture has to do more than treat sensorial effect as a byproduct of providing a decorative, occupiable box, and certainly not leave the task to technology alone. Architects should actively design the sensorial experience where select elements intentionally generate sensorial effect and the "immaterial" (light, scent, air) becomes material. A sensorial approach could generate an architecturally living "pulse" of sorts - a series of complementary cues that interacts with its users in a number of intelligent ways depending on spatial function, utility and program.

Graphically, surfaces can be understood as optical illusions with patterning, abstract color blocking, painted tromp l'oeils, digital projections, or the wall form itself combined with motorized parts or mirrored surfaces. A sensorial pulse can occur in form. Parametric approaches to architectural form are particularly adept at generating cohesive visual effects through often arbitrary-seeming discrete repetition (like mountain ridges) or surface smoothing (like ocean waves). Natural and artificial lighting delineate in multiple dimensions, giving preferential treatment to specific areas or elements on a temporal basis. Alternatively, a spatial experience may be enhanced by the absence of light as with spaces of worship or meditation or a romantic candlelit dinner. One could begin to question how we might benefit from a lack of light in daily experience. Would we be encouraged to spend less time staring into the flashlights that are our mobile devices if we were forced to only use them in dark spaces? Supergraphics, tech-driven hyper-graphics, parametric form, and selective lighting are some possible approaches toward a sensorial architecture. How might they all be combined for perhaps a more desensitizing, overwhelming or even cathartic sensorial experience?

Sensorial effects already inform our experience of architecture and space in perceptual and more subtly perceptible feedback loops. Imagine the possibilities if architecture were to more intentionally engage our senses. What might be gained from sensorial architecture? It can enhance the experience of typical spaces, generate new spatial experiences and architectural perceptions and progressively introduce new architectural elements, programming and typologies. Our thinking about architectural experience through the lens of sense perception is currently limited. Instead, in actively expanding on typical notions of sense's relation to space, we might venture upon a new architectural sense-scape that takes hold in the notion of sense as a starting point and a goal of architectural creation.