School of Architecture Assistant Professor Jennifer Bonner has been honored as a 2013-14 Faculty Design award winner by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) for her Olfactory Past project. She will receive the award at the 102nd annual ACSA conference in Miami in April.

The award is part of the ACSA’s Architectural Education Awards, which are given each year to honor architectural educators for exemplary work in areas such as building design, community collaborations, scholarship, and service. The award-winning professors inspire and challenge students, contribute to the profession’s knowledge base, and extend their work beyond the borders of academy into practice and the public sector. The Faculty Design award recognizes projects that demonstrate outstanding work in architecture and related environmental design fields as a critical endeavor.

“This is a great honor for Jennifer,” said George Johnston, chair of the School of Architecture. “Her work is collaborative in the very best sense, and the work recognized by this award successfully applies and extends her design research about those sensorial dimensions of architecture that are at once so difficult to represent yet which nonetheless constitute the essence, so to speak, of the field’s cultural significance.”

This first exhibit of its kind, Olfactory Past considers the role of scent as an unexplored realm for architectural practice. Bonner, working with Christain Stayner from the University of Michigan, proposes installing 11 sculptures throughout historic Borden Park in Edmonton, Canada. These sculptures dispense scents created to embody both the history of the park and of Edmonton itself. From early settlements (grazing bison and icefields) to the turn of the century (fairground rides), to today (barbeque and athletics), Olfactory Past creates a sensory archaeology of public space and is both conceptual and experiential.

For more information on the ACSA awards and to see a complete listing of the awards and winners, visit http://www.acsa-arch.org/programs-events/awards/archives/2014-awards-press-release.