Visitors climbing the New Museum's newly unveiled atrium stairway this week have encountered something unexpected: a shifting landscape of scent that transforms the architectural experience into something intimate, even unsettling.

Artist Klara Hodsnedlova has inaugurated the soaring new stairway—designed by architecture firm OMA—with a site-specific olfactory installation that asks a deceptively simple question: What if we experienced museums not just through our eyes, but through our most memory-laden sense?

The installation marks a significant moment for both the artist and the institution. According to the New York Times, Hodsnedlova's work introduces visitors to OMA's dramatic architectural intervention through scent rather than spectacle, a choice that feels both radical and strangely democratic in a cultural landscape often dominated by the visual.

Architecture Meets Olfaction

OMA's atrium stairway represents a major expansion of the New Museum's Bowery building, creating new circulation patterns and sight lines through the contemporary art institution. But rather than allowing the architecture to speak purely through form and light, museum leadership invited Hodsnedlova to layer meaning onto the space through an entirely different sensory register.

The decision reflects broader shifts in how museums think about accessibility and engagement. While visual art has long dominated institutional spaces, olfactory work opens possibilities for visitors with different sensory experiences and challenges the primacy of sight in how we understand culture.

Hodsnedlova, whose previous work has explored the intersection of memory, place, and bodily experience, brings a particularly thoughtful approach to scent-based art. Unlike commercial fragrance or simple aromatherapy, her installations tend to work with complex, sometimes challenging odors that evoke specific environments or emotional states.

The Politics of Smell

There's something inherently vulnerable about scent-based art. We can close our eyes or look away from visual work, but smell bypasses our rational defenses, triggering memory and emotion before conscious thought can intervene.

This quality makes olfactory installations particularly powerful in public spaces, where they can create unexpected moments of intimacy or discomfort. The "musky aroma" referenced in early visitor responses suggests Hodsnedlova hasn't opted for easy pleasantness—musk carries associations with bodies, with animal presence, with the organic processes we often try to sanitize away in pristine museum environments.

By introducing such an earthy, embodied scent into OMA's clean architectural lines, the artist may be asking visitors to consider what gets excluded when we design spaces for art and contemplation. Museums have historically been places of controlled atmosphere, where climate and light are carefully regulated. Adding scent—especially scent that references the biological—disrupts that control.

Expanding the Sensory Museum

The New Museum has built its reputation on supporting experimental and sometimes challenging contemporary art. This installation continues that tradition while also pointing toward emerging practices in museum design and programming.

Other institutions have begun exploring multi-sensory experiences, from the Tate's scent-based tours to the Cooper Hewitt's tactile design exhibitions. But olfactory installations remain relatively rare, in part because they're technically complex and in part because they can't be easily photographed or shared on social media—the currency of contemporary museum engagement.

Hodsnedlova's work for the OMA stairway may signal growing institutional willingness to prioritize embodied experience over Instagram-ability. In an era when museums compete for attention in increasingly digital spaces, creating something that must be physically encountered feels like a quiet form of resistance.

The atrium installation also raises practical questions about duration and maintenance. Scent dissipates, changes with temperature and humidity, interacts with the smells visitors bring with them. Unlike a painting that can hang unchanged for months, olfactory work requires constant attention and adjustment.

What Visitors Encounter

Early reports suggest the scent shifts as visitors move through the stairway, creating a narrative or emotional arc that mirrors the physical journey upward through the museum. This approach transforms circulation space—typically treated as merely functional—into an artwork in its own right.

The choice to focus on a stairway rather than a gallery also democratizes the experience. Every visitor must pass through this space, regardless of which exhibitions they've come to see. The installation becomes unavoidable, woven into the basic experience of moving through the institution.

For a museum that has consistently championed artists working at the boundaries of traditional media, Hodsnedlova's olfactory intervention feels like a natural extension of the New Museum's mission. It asks visitors to slow down, to notice, to engage with space through senses we typically ignore in cultural settings.

As museums continue to grapple with questions of access, engagement, and what constitutes meaningful cultural experience in an increasingly mediated world, experiments like this one offer valuable lessons. Not every visitor will appreciate the musky aroma drifting through OMA's elegant stairway. But everyone will be forced to reckon with it—and with their own sensory responses to shared space.

That friction between individual experience and collective environment may be exactly the point.