Sense of the City, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1920

As visitors first step into the latest exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the senses are immediately aroused. We are drawn through a dark and narrow tunnel and, before our eyes can adjust, the sounds of a railway station, with trains pulling up to and leaving platforms and announcers calling out the next departures in various languages, immediately evoke the constant movement of city life. A small screen tells us that one minute we are in Cologne, the next in Lille, and thus, with eyes squinting and ears alert, begins a sensorial voyage through urban space. Questioning assumptions is the primary objective of "Sense of the City," curated by the CCA’s recently appointed director, architect, and scholar Mirko Zardini, who wants to inspire visitors to think differently about how they experience their urban environment. Zardini reminds us that although the visual has always been privileged in urban dwellers’ conception, design, and interaction with their milieu, cities also stimulate the other senses in a multitude of ways. A more pronounced appreciation of how we touch, hear, smell, and perhaps even taste the city, argues this exhibition, will not only lead us to a fuller, more balanced understanding of our habitat, but will also encourage us to formulate new claims for an environment planned with greater sensitivity to our fundamentally, though oft-neglected, corporeal relationship with urban space.