Qiyi Eldoris Cai

AER 

I began this project from a recurring perception: that simple, everyday elements carry unexpected qualities. For me, the number six is green and tastes like grapes; even bottled water seems to have its own character, some sharp, some rounded, some soft like cotton.

AER is an olfactory-driven hospitality project that explores scent as a spatial medium. While interior architecture often prioritizes the visual, this work asks how smell can shape spatial sequence and emotional experience.

Fragrance becomes a way to organize space, translating into light, material, movement, and airflow. For instance, a pear-led composition (Pear / Fir and Cassia Seed / Benzoin) can be translated into spatial shifts: brightness and speed at the volatile top note, corresponds to a sunlit threshold with reflective materials such as glass and brass, a faster circulation tempo, and a horizontal airflow that carries scent across the body like passing wind during a morning drive; as the composition shifts into fir and cassia seed, the environment moves toward greater depth and steadier diffusions; and enclosed, absorptive warmth in the resinous base.

Through prototyping, this thesis proposes synesthetic mapping as a method, where scent generates spaces.