Environment
Take a Smell Tour of San Francisco's Presidio Park
This weekend, sensory explorers can huff the park’s trees, dirt, “yeast,” and “wet cement.”
“I'm going to ask people to just pick up some dirt in their hands and smell the dirt,” says Laura Halsey Brown, an interdisciplinary artist in San Francisco. “Just smelling dirt I think is lovely.”
Halsey Brown is referring to an exhibit this weekend at her senseofplace LAB in the Presidio, the city’s sprawling northwestern park that’s crammed with fog-kissed trees, nature-inspired sculptures, crumbling military fortifications and, it turns out, a deluge of mysterious odors. For “Architecture as Pedestal” (October 29 and 30, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.), she’ll be talking scent and providing hand-drawn smell maps of the park, so visitors can take their noses on a journey and hoover up the park’s glorious musk.