(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)

Chapter 42

Puzzle

Rachel Carley

This chapter examines how constraints can be deployed to activate the interior and its contents in rich and variegated detail. It will identify how the French novelist George Perec enlists voluntary constraints to pry open potential space in his novel, Life A User’s Manual. This chapter proposes that Perec’s methods of literary construction open up discourses and debates with respect to how interior architecture can be taught, particularly how “layers” of constraints might be deployed to generate innovative designs.

In the last fifteen years, researchers have investigated the sociopolitical resonances at work in Perec’s enumeration of quotidian spaces.¹ Articles shed light on his complex use of arbitrary formal constraints and their impact on diegetic continuity.² Some articles have focused upon Perec’s indebtedness to art practices, such as Fluxus and the Situationists, in the use of strategies of chance, detournement, and collage in his texts.³ In addition, a number of papers have examined the architectonic resonances at work in Perec’s writings.⁴ Enrique Walker has delivered architecture seminars and taught design studio courses at Columbia University that examine the relationships between architecture and constraint, looking towards Perec’s writings for inspiration.⁵ However, there

is scant scholarship to date on how Perec exploits constraints to fabricate interiors that reconceptualize the relationships between occupants, objects, and rooms.

Constraints are inherent in the mediums we use to represent ideas in written or visual forms. Within literary practice there exist a series of primary constraints that frame creative endeavor, including issues of grammar, spelling, and written composition. In addition to these, there are the constraints of genre that underpin literary expression. Interior architecture is also a practice that is subject to multiple primary constraints. There are the constraints that exist within industry, which guide the development and delivery of a project. These are laid out in the project brief, with its specific programmatic requirements. There are also restrictions imposed by budgets, building codes, and the specific exigencies of the site and the surrounding context to work within. Furthermore, conventional modes of interior architectural representation, such as plans, sections, elevations, and perspectives, impose their own limitations on how the interior is analyzed and understood. However, another layer of voluntary constraints can be superimposed over these primary constraints to enhance both literary and interior architecture practices. An artful and systematic manipulation of “second order” constraints can allow ample scope for innovation. It is proposed that the interior architecture studio could be a vital site of experimentation through the use of arbitrary constraints, opening up new territories of spatial, material, and technological invention.

Life challenges definitions of realism in literature by utilizing “Oulipian” constraints. Perec was a member of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature). Founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960, this group was dedicated to the study of literary form based on systems of rigorous constraint, appropriating formal patterns and strategies from domains like mathematics, logic, and chess. The types of literary forms the Oulipians pursued included the acrostic, spoonerism, the lipogram, and the palindrome. They were of the belief that “systems of formal constraint – far from restricting a writer – actually affords a field of creative liberty.”

Innovation was at the center of Oulipian enterprise. Their aim was to systematically introduce new forms of literary expression that operated against the myth of literary inspiration, offering an alternative to types of literature produced by force of habit. Oulipians utilized text in three-dimensional forms, such as poems for Moebius strip, anaglyphic text (a three-dimensional verbal text), and holopoems, which employ the idea of holography, representing poems as images in space, which, as the reader moves in, over, under, or around them, they discover new words or verses. It was thought that by increasing the difficulty of the constraints imposed on the writing process, there would be an increase in the merit of its resolution. Thus, the success of Oulipian creativity was dependent upon “the difficulty of the problem and the elegance of the solution.”

The work of the Oulipians divided critics. Some saw their use of constraints as innovative, while others saw the application of constraints as pretentious. Perec believed that many within the literary establishment failed to acknowledge writing “as practice, as work, as play … Systematic artifices, formal mannerisms … are relegated to the registers of asylums for literary madmen.” He believed constraints were treated as “aberrations” rather than respected for their literary ingenuity. Warren Motte suggests that accusations of literary madness were targeted at the members of Oulipo “in order to suppress innovation and thus maintain the hegemony of the canon.” Potential Literature was in search of new forms and structures that could be appropriated by writers to advance the discipline.

Perec’s comments give value to practice-based enquiry and experimentation. Another place where these values are fostered is the interior architecture studio, where students are encouraged to test new ideas, explore new modes of design representation, and develop critical thinking skills through practice-based research. The strategies used by the Oulipians to invigorate their discipline and question a priori assumptions about literary inspiration could be adapted and used within a design studio setting to assist students in synthesizing the complex matrix of relationships that exist in a design program.

Perec’s novel Life demonstrates how constraints can be creatively deployed to activate interiors. Life describes a Parisian apartment building situated at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Saul Steinberg’s drawing The Art of Living (1952) inspired the author. Steinberg’s sectional perspective depicts a boarding house in New York, replete with residents surrounded by their sundry belongings. The building facade has been peeled away to expose a cross section of the interior, representing the apartment and its inhabitants at one moment in time. Valene, the apartment’s oldest resident, provides a guided tour of the building’s interiors. The key theme of the novel revolves around the complex art of jigsaw puzzling, inaugurating a dialogue between the puzzle maker and puzzler, the writer and the reader. The puzzle becomes a metaphor for the literary constraints superimposed on the narrative: the puzzler has anticipated every move the puzzler will make; every combination has been calculated in advance. The reader needs to approach each chapter of the novel as a puzzle piece that relates to a larger story or picture.

The story of Gaspard Winckler, the puzzler maker, and his employer, Percival Bartlebooth, the puzzle solver, guides the narrative of Life. The English millionaire Bartlebooth undertakes a Sisyphean quest that, if successful, would destroy itself as it proceeded. He studies watercolor painting and then travels the world for twenty years, painting five hundred seascapes in five hundred different ports. When each painting is completed, he ships them to another apartment resident, Winckler, who makes them into jigsaw puzzles. Bartlebooth then determines to return to the apartment and spend the next twenty years reassembling the jigsaws, which Winckler has made progressively more difficult to complete. The final part of Bartlebooth’s project is to revisit each port with each jigsaw intact, dipping the jigsaw in a detergent solution until nothing else is left but blank paper. No trace would remain of an endeavor that took fifty years to complete. But the project is thwarted by Winckler’s cunning and Bartlebooth’s deteriorating eyesight and premature demise. Bartlebooth’s plight can be seen as a leitmotif for the structure of the novel itself, which is underwritten by rigorous constraints that are ultimately abandoned by Perec as the novel

draws to a close.\textsuperscript{17} In consciously building errors into his system of constraints, Perec was utilizing the Oulipian \textit{clinamen}, a term Perec takes from Epicurean theory, which proposes that, “The world functions because from the outset there is of a lack of balance.”\textsuperscript{18} Perec’s use of the clinamen in Life acknowledges that even the most exquisitely designed master plan cannot avoid factors outside of its control, such as death.

Part one: the use of constraints in Life

Two overarching systems of formal constraint operate as the scaffold for Life. These constraints determine the sequence of the chapters and the elements employed in each chapter. The layout of the apartments within the novel makes reference to the dimensions of an expanded chessboard, measuring ten stories high by ten rooms wide. The sequence of the chapters has been determined by the knight’s tour of the chessboard, where the knight moves around the board landing on every square only once. The second formal constraint Perec used involved an algorithm borrowed from higher mathematics known as the “orthogonal Latin bi-square order 10.” This bi-square was “mapped directly onto the block of flats, and for each grid location (that is, each room and chapter) it gives a unique pair of numbers, out of two sets only from zero to nine, or twenty ‘elements’ in all.” Perec used twenty-one bi-squares, each consisting of two lists of ten elements, resulting in forty-two lists in total, with “420 ‘things’ to distribute, forty-two to a box (and never the same forty-two twice).” Perec’s twenty-one algorithms were used to elaborate pre-established lists of forty-two heterogeneous elements, including interior details, objects, furnishings, situations, literary allusions, and quotations, that had to figure in each chapter of the novel. Nineteen of the forty-two specifications include descriptions of the interior architecture, furnishings, surface finishes, fabrics, and objects that populate each room.

Each of the ninety-nine chapters of Life begins with a detailed description of a room within the apartment building. A selection of objects and interior details are described, and through these descriptions the reader begins to learn small, personal details about the residents occupying each room. Each object has its own itinerant history that helps the reader construct a partial biography of the resident. The psychological interiors of Perec’s characters are not excavated in detail. The distancing effects of the narration throughout the novel are due to these indirect character

descriptions. They are also a consequence of the regulatory principles Perec superimposes on the narrative.\textsuperscript{25} Throughout Life, Perec utilizes situationist strategies of detournement and collage, sampling existing texts and organizing them into new formal relationships.\textsuperscript{26} Each chapter also includes a reference to one of Perec’s other writings and an activity/event or object that he experienced as he was writing the chapter.\textsuperscript{27}

Perec’s ingenious use of these diverse combinatories, in tandem with his synthesis of literary precedent, affords the reader a dynamic and idiosyncratic view of radically different interior worlds found within the cellular structure of an apartment building. Life demonstrates how interior surfaces and objects, both individually and collectively, can activate rooms and the interior imagination more generally. Perec’s articulation of the space between objects marks a space between significant events – signaling an irruption in spatiotemporal relationships. These condensations of different spaces and times are mimicked in the digital transactions students engage with every day in their search for inspiration. Students move swiftly across continents and vast time zones through digital networks to glean a diverse arsenal of research materials. Private interiors have never been more open to public scrutiny.

Part two: how designers can learn from Perec

Wardrip-Fruin notes that in Life, “Text and image, narrative and still life, the infra-ordinary and the outlandish tale are artfully combined.” To date, the author of this chapter has constructed and delivered two architecture and interior design studio papers that have been directly and indirectly influenced by Perec’s novel. The first studio, Intérieur, required students to critically examine Life. By drawing attention to the objects, surfaces, and interior details found within rooms, the novel foregrounds what architectural educations tend to disavow: a detailed study of the interior that is not limited to the diagrammatic sectioning of this space but is, rather, redolent with detail that evidences a commitment to occupying the interior itself. Throughout the paper, particular attention was placed on the ways in which the interior was wrought in an array of architectural representations using different media.

In the second studio, Natura Morta: Architectures of Still Life, students were required to investigate how domestic objects, and the genre of still life in particular, could function as catalysts in the formation of innovative interior spaces. Each student was required to conduct in-depth research into this genre, locating its currency for contemporary spatial practice. This paper drew attention toward the significant role objects play in the formation and occupation of the interior, highlighting how quotidian objects can be studied to excavate their spatial potential.

Figure 42.1 “Still Life Studies,” 2012; Photographic studies for Natura Morta: Architectures of Still Life, Design Studio Paper (2012) Image credit: Natalie Bradburn

During the design studio, the students were directed to complete a series of twenty-five models as part of an iterative model-making exercise used to construct a series of hybrid forms. These forms were all generated from three initial concept models: the first interrogated an aspect of the student’s bespoke research question; the second, a position on the site and context; and the third, a position on a design detail gleaned from their research. This exercise brought together disparate aspects of their design research to create conceptual and formal connections between them.

The next phase in the analysis of Perec’s work will be to test and critically evaluate how a series of “second order” Perquian constraints can be deployed in the design studio to irrupt spatial conventions and modes of representation, introducing new design methods that foster the development of “potential space,” a space of creative inquiry guided by voluntary constraints. How might new forms of spatial expression be introduced to the design studio, which, in line with the Oulipian’s quest, operate against the myth of inspiration, providing an alternative to types of creative practice that are produced by force of habit? Students engage with a range of different source materials. They examine precedents from interior design, architecture, film, and fine art. They research historical and contemporary theories of space and placemaking, investigate the impact of new technologies on how we apprehend and experience the interior by analyzing the representational biases of computer rendering programs and gaming environments, and the possibilities inherent in interactive design platforms. Students also research the expanded fields of material culture, science, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies.

There are a number of ways that these diverse influences might be analyzed and synthesized into design studio practice. The brief may require, through its very design, that students specifically identify key precedents,

theorists, or contemporary cultural phenomena that have informed their work. However, there are always many anxious moments in the delivery of a project from a student’s perspective, as they have to identify how they can deploy these diverse influences to spatial effect.

The use of “second order” constraints may provide a new means of doing this by establishing an armature that coordinates and quantifies spatial, material, technological, and theoretical information to be embedded within the design project. It could include a series of compulsory spatial gestures, events, situations, objects, materials, and drawing and modeling notations that each student (or their tutor) would supply. This matrix of relationships would require the student to develop a design methodology to weave these multivalent strands of creative practice together. The collection of materials to be included would ensure the student acknowledged the life of the interior of a building in time: activated by the extraordinary events and ordinary rituals and performances of everyday life. By using such forms of rule-governed composition to juxtapose selected spatial, material, theoretical, and technical elements from the past and the present, there is the possibility that new idiosyncratic designs could emerge which amalgamate a diverse array of influences.

The use of such systematic, playful processes could irritupt a priori understandings of what might constitute an interior architecture proposition. It would do this by taking contemporary design precedents (which often become the center of a student’s research inquiry) and ensuring they were analyzed in relation to other categories of design research (the sociocultural, theoretical, and technical), synthesizing them into part of a wider contextualization of placemaking. This would allow students to analyze the constituent relationships between objects, surfaces, subjects, and contexts.

Life challenges conventional hierarchies between objects and rooms, between contents and containers. The novel invites us to reconsider the hierarchies that exist between the interior architect and the interior decorator, making these discriminations not so clear-cut. It does this by politicizing objects: by acknowledging that interior environments are not

neutral but highly inflected spaces that demonstrate the occupiers’ relationship to the contemporary social and cultural milieu they inhabit through the objects they possess and consume. Life shows us that voluntary constraints can aid and abet innovation. Warren Motte observes “in both theory and practice,” Perec “severely questions such traditional distinctions as that between structure and theme.” Perec’s synthesis of his formal literary proposition within his narrative intentions provides an example to students, who are encouraged to consider how their design concepts can be embedded into the material details of a project. Second order constraints offer the possibility of multilayered interior design propositions that acknowledge the complexities inherent in the inception, development, and occupation of a project over time.

Notes

Paul Virilio, “Paul Virilio on George Perec”, AA Files 45/46 (2002): 15–18.
Matthew Escobar, “X: Identity, Reflexivity and Potential Space in Perec’s W Ou Le Souvenir D’Enfance and Gide’s Le Faux Monnayeurs, The Romantic Review 98, no. 4 (2007): 413–433; Kuisma Korhonen, “Narrating the Trauma: George Perec’s Wou le Souvenir d’enfance”, in Terror and the Arts: Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations, ed. Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski (New York: Macmillan, 2005), pp. 113–128.
Tania Ørum, “Georges Perec and the Avant-Garde in the Visual Arts”, Textual Practice 20, no. 2 (2006): 319–332.
David Bellos, “Writing Spaces: Perec in Perspective”, Cambridge Architectural Journal no. 9 (1997–8): 11–18; Peta Mitchell, “Constructing the Architext: George Perec’s Life a User’s Manual”, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 37/1 (March 2004): 1–16.
Enrique Walker, “Scaffoldings”, in From Rules to Constraints: Luis M. Mansilla + Emilio Tuñón, ed. Giancarlo Valle (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2012).
Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, founded OuLiPo in 1960. The group included writers, mathematicians, musicians, directors, and specialists in electronics. There were two key research areas within Oulipo: the first focused upon analysis or Anoulipism and was dedicated to the identification and recuperation of older experiments in form, such as the sonnet. The second research area investigated synthesis, or Synthoulipism, and focused upon the invention and

elaboration of new forms. Warren Motte, Jr., ed., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (McLean, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1986), pp. 1–2.

7 An acrostic is a poem or word puzzle, or other written composition, in which certain letters in each line form a word or words. A spoonerism is a usually unintended transposition of two sounds in two or more words. A lipogram is the exclusion of a letter or letters from a written composition. Perec composed an entire novel, La Disparation, without the use of the letter E. A palindrome is a written text that reads the same backwards or forwards.

8 Motte Jr., ed., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, p. 18.

9 In the second Oulipian Manifesto, Francois Le Lionnais identified one of the preeminent concerns of the group, which was focusing upon the “Creative expenditure on the formal aspects of literary production: alphabetical, consonantal, vocalic, syllabic, phonetic, graphic, prosodic, rhymic, rhythmic, and numerical constraints, structures or programs”. Francois Le Lionnais in Motte, Jr., ed., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, p. 29.

10 A process elaborated by Luc Etienne that involved the use of a text on a Moebius strip. Motte, Jr., ed., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, p. 211, 212.

11 Warren Motte Jr., The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of George Perec (Kentucky: French Forum Publishers, 1984), p. 19.

12 Georges Perec in Motte, Jr., ed., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, p. 5.

13 Motte, Jr., ed., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, p. 5.

14 Bellos, George Perec, p. 513.

15 Mitchell, “Constructing the Architext”, p. 4.

16 David Bellos writes: “Bartlebooth’s plan to complete a life without leaving a trace or a ripple on the surface of things must fail because it ignores death, or rather seeks to treat death only as an event that follows the completion of life, rather than as the radical imperfection that is in life and constitutes moral existence”; David Bellos, “Literary Quotations in Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi, French Studies 41 (1987): 193.

17 Peta Mitchell notes that in the novel the constraint of the bi-square is not completely realized, and the knight’s tour fails to visit one room in the apartment (the cellar is missing). Many tales in the book also emphasize elaborate plans and schemes that are always foiled. Valene’s painting of the apartment will also remain unfinished, left as a preparatory sketch when he dies at the end of the book; Mitchell, “Constructing the Architext”, p. 13.

18 Perec deliberately omitted the 66th chapter of Life, corresponding to the 66th move of the knight’s tour of the chessboard. Bellos comments on why this omission may have been made:

“Perec may have chosen to number 66 either because it mimics the novel’s starting point on grid square 6, 6 or because it mirrors the inevitable number of the last chapter, 99: as 66 and 99 can also be seen as representations of German opening and closing quotation marks, the choice of move sixty-six for the gap may have been intended as a secret signal of the presence of unacknowledged quotations in the book, or, even more abstrusely, of the text’s status as “text” Bellos, A Life in Words, p. 599; Perec says that he removed chapter 66 of Life “in order to break the symmetry, to introduce an error into the system, because when a system of constraints is established, there must also be anticonstraint within it. The system of constraints – and this is important – must be destroyed. It must not be rigid; there must be some play in it; it must, as they say, ‘creak’ a bit; it must not be completely coherent, there must be a clinamen”; George Perec in Motte, Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, pp. 19–20.

Tom Emerson, “From Lieux to Life …”, AA Files 45/46 (2002): 93.

Mitchell, “Constructing the Architect”, pp. 9–10; Mitchell comments: “The chessboard itself also acts as a Latin bi-square of order ten … this bi-square … is a ten-by-ten array of squares, with each of the hundred squares ascribed a paired value from two sets of elements (traditionally an array of numbers and letters). There are two basic rules that govern distribution of the twenty elements in a bi-square of order ten: first, each of the hundred pairings must be unique, and second, each element may occur only once in any given row or column. In the case of Life A User’s Manual, the bi-square dictates which objects and which quotations are to be found in each of the hundred rooms, but has little or no bearing upon the narrative development of the novel”.

Bellos, Georges Perec, p. 515.

Ibid.

Bellos notes that Perec, “used twenty-one bi-squares, each comprising two lists of ten ‘elements’, giving forty-two lists in all, with 420 ‘things’ to distribute, forty-two to a box (and never the same forty-two twice)”; Bellos in Mitchell, “Constructing the Architect”, p. 10. In addition, each chapter, its title prefaced by its location on the gird square, included these relevant coordinates in the text of most chapters. Bellos, Georges Perec, p. 606.

See Lists 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38.

David Bellos notes that Perec “gives the reader virtually no access to the inner lives of its named characters”; Bellos, “Writing Spaces: Perec in Perspective”, p. 16.

This is emblematized by one of Life’s central characters, Percival Bartlebooth, who was based upon two literary protagonists: Bartleby, from Herman Melville’s short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853) (New York: Melville House, 2004) and the central

character from Valéry Larbaud’s novel, The Diary of A.O. Barnabooth: A Novel (c. 1913) (London: Quartet Books, 1991).

27 Bellos, Georges Perec, pp. 605–606.

28 Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Writing Networks: New Media, Potential Literature”, Leonardo 29, no. 5 (1996): 361. Fruin sees the structures and frameworks found in Life as having possibilities for the development of new media tools which enable authors to give connections and create structures using pad, a zooming interface that “brings continuous space and relative size to the presentation (and navigation) possibilities of new media.” Fruin, “Writing Networks”, p. 363.

29 Motte, Jr., The Poetics of Experiment, p. 16.