Leen Ajlan

Leen is an architectural designer from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, who is currently based in London. Her upbringing in Jeddah has underpinned her interests in the physical and virtual representation of Arab culture and built environment, and the complexities of decolonising those depictions. Her current project is based in Al Balad, Saudi Arabia, where she is exploring the role of scent and fragrance in Hejazi culture, through looking at local fragrance production techniques and cultural rituals.

Leen received her bachelors in Architecture from The University of Westminster, and continued to work as an architectural assistant and freelance designer. Her recent published work includes drawings for ’Three British Mosques’ at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale by Shahed Saleem, and mentioned in The Journal of Civil Architecture. Currently, Leen is a commissioned artist at ’Staple: What’s on Your Plate’ at Hayy Jameel in Jeddah Saudi Arabia, where she exhibits her first year ADS3 studio project ‘Desert’s Don’t Bloom’.

The intergenerational family recipe book

Scents of AlHejaz looks to investigate the role of fragrance and its significance to Arab culture, by studying the labour practices integrated into the community. Fragrances are imbedded in Arab culture, mainly through their significance in Islam, a religion that is intertwined with the traditions of the region. In Saudi Arabia specifically, the distilling of fragrances and oil based perfumes are an intergenerational craft, carrying the significance of the heritage within it. Historical Al-Balad, located in the centre of Jeddah Saudi Arabia, is the home base of a Hejazi community that specialises in artisanal fragrance making. These fragrances are circulated in the tight-knit community of the Hejazi region, where scents and oils are used for medicinal, religious and culinary uses. In today’s labour practices, the contemporary manufacturing of branded perfumes dislocates the craft from the site of practice, a process that is simply replicated by the use of machines and artificial ingredients. Today, coupled with the ongoing gentrification of the site, albalad’s ‘scent’ is changing and soon to be replaced alongside the cultural rituals attached to it.

By creating a new shared domestic typology that circulates around a primarily olfactory experience, the project aims to investigate how scent can be used to enhance an individual’s memories and association with space through focusing on Hejazi cultural rituals. Where does home start? How can scent evoke memories, familiarities and reactions to generate personal connections to architecture? By orchestrating this domestic typology as a journey, the new typology will create a collective environment designed purposefully to cater to experiential qualities of smell and memories.

Scents inhabited in the Hejazi home