Nycthemeral

Definition

Nycthemeral names Perec's term (from the day-night cycle, nyx/hemera) for the temporal procedure by which the modern apartment is organized: "in the ideal dividing-up of today's apartments functionality functions in accordance with a procedure that is unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral. The activities of the day correspond to slices of time, and to each slice of time there corresponds one room of the apartment" (Perec, p. 260). The apartment is the day's timetable made architectural: each quarter-hour of the 07.00–22.00 day is routed to exactly one room — kitchen (breakfast, lunch-preparation, dishes, tea, supper), bathroom (washes at seven intervals across the day), entrance-hall (coats taken and returned nine times), dining-room (lunch and supper), child's room (homework, bed), sitting-room (the evening "whiled away"). The room is the unit into which the day is sliced; the timetable is the apartment's program in its plainest form.

Perec's model is "both fictional and problematic, though I'm convinced of its elementary rightness (no one lives exactly like that, of course, but it is nevertheless like that, and not otherwise, that architects and town planners see us as living or want us to live)" (p. 262). The nycthemeral day is thus neither pure description nor pure prescription: it is the norm the design professions live by and design to — the everyday as architect's script. The concept's provocations follow from the model's own logic: (1) the functional definition of rooms ("a room in which there is a…") reduces each room-type to a furniture-inventory; (2) the room itself is "a fairly malleable space" — "a sort of cube, or let's say rectangular parallelepiped" — on which any function can be imposed; (3) functionalism cannot distinguish value: "the sitting-room and bedroom are of hardly any more importance than the broom closet (the vacuum cleaner goes into the broom closet; exhausted bodies into the bedroom: the two functions are the same, of recuperation and maintenance)" (p. 262); and (4) the modernist open plan changes nothing, since the pseudo-modular space merely renames the sequence — "not a kitchen but a cooking-area, not a bedroom but a sleeping-area, not a dining-room but an eating-area" (p. 262). It was against the nycthemeral procedure that Perec proposed his alternative layout-principles (functional relationships, the senses, heptadian rhythms, thematic arrangements) — the constraint-generated alternatives the essay's editors summarize as layouts "generated by either functional relationships between rooms, or the functioning of senses, or days of the week, or thematic arrangements" (editors, p. 259).

The model is also gendered: the timetable's three occupants do not share a day. The father's slices are office-hours and coats; the child's are school, tea and homework; the mother's day is the apartment — housework ("The mother takes the vacuum cleaner from the [broom closet] and does the housework (she then goes through all the rooms of the apartment but I forbear from listing them)," p. 260), shopping, cooking, dishes, errands, fetching the child. The nycthemeral order is a gendered division of labour made temporal.

Key Thinkers

• Georges Perec — the concept's author (1974/2006): the "unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral" procedure, the 07.00–22.00 timetable, the definitional room-list, and the four alternative layout-principles. His own footnote flags the phrase: "This is the best phrase in the whole book!"
• Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the editors who excerpted the essay for Intimus under the everyday's spatial banner, framing it as Perec "question[ing] the banal and mundane activities occurring in the spaces of our inhabitation… mapped through a slice of time" (p. 259).

Related Concepts

• Time-Geography — the analytic the timetable anticipates: a domestic space-time path, plotted quarter-hour by quarter-hour, with coupling constraints (the shared breakfast at 07.45, the family supper at 19.00) and authority constraints (office hours, school hours) routing three occupants through the same room-sequence. See Maycroft's time-geographic everyday.
• Heptadian — the alternative rhythm Perec opposes to the circadian/nycthemeral day: the week instead of the day as the apartment's organizing cycle.
• Thematic Arrangement — the layout that abandons rhythm altogether for theme: the room as a total program (boat, Pole, Dame Tartine).
• Infra-Ordinary — the concept's methodological home: the nycthemeral timetable is what questioning the infra-ordinary finds when it interrogates "these self-evident facts" it would seem "derisory" to question.
• Everyday Life — the everyday given its spatial form: the day that "correspond[s] to slices of time" is the quotidian as the design professions assume it.
• Habit — the designed day as habit externalized: the sequence that "runs itself" through rooms is habit turned into plan (see the habit page's sixth register).
• Repetition — the nycthemeral cycle as the everyday's cyclical repetition spatially fixed: Başeren's "familiar arrangement of actions (waking up, having breakfast, going to work at a certain hour…)" rendered as floor plan.
• Colonization of Everyday Life — the administered everyday in plan form: the day the planner "want[s] us to live."
• Domestic Interior — the concept's site: the apartment as functional division; the room-type pages (dining-room, kitchen, bathroom) are the inventory's chapters.
• Gender and the Interior — the timetable's gender structure: the mother's day is the apartment; the father's day begins where the apartment ends.
• Flexible Interior — the pseudo-modular equivalence: open planning as flexibility that changes nothing — "not a kitchen but a cooking-area."
• Programming — the timetable as the domestic functional program in its plainest, satirical form.
• Tidying — the broom closet's register: "the vacuum cleaner goes into the broom closet," and its circuit "through all the rooms" is the maintenance function the functional hierarchy conceals.
• Work/Leisure Distinction — the timetable's economy: office-hours for the father, the "whiled away" evening for the couple, the unbroken work-day for the mother.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Apartment (Perec 1974/2006) — the concept's founding text: the "unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral" procedure (p. 260); the 07.00–22.00 timetable (pp. 260–262); the model's double status as fiction and "elementary rightness" (p. 262); the broom-closet/bedroom equivalence ("the two functions are the same, of recuperation and maintenance," p. 262); the pseudo-modular equivalence ("not a kitchen but a cooking-area," p. 262); the gendered day; the editor's frame (p. 259).

Open Questions

• What is the ontological status of the nycthemeral model — description, norm, or satire? Perec's "no one lives exactly like that, of course, but it is nevertheless like that, and not otherwise, that architects and town planners see us as living or want us to live" holds all three at once: can a design theory operate on a norm that is fictional and "elementarily right" in the same gesture?
• The mother's day fills the apartment; the father's day begins at its door ("goes off to his office"). Is the nycthemeral procedure structurally gendered — a 24-hour cycle that only one occupant completes — and would a non-gendered timetable be a different apartment?
• The timetable routes occupants to rooms by the clock; time-geography plots space-time paths by the same logic. Does the apartment implement time-geography (the plan as coupling constraint), or does the timetable reveal that the constraint was always the design's — the plan prescribing the paths it claims to accommodate?
• The pseudo-modular space renames but does not re-order the day ("my model would not be modified in any practical way"). Is open planning therefore the nycthemeral procedure's completion rather than its critique — and what would an apartment look like whose open plan did modify the day?
• "I forbear from listing them": the housework traversal through "all the rooms of the apartment" is the one activity the timetable declines to itemize. Is the unlistable housework the nycthemeral model's constitutive outside — the labour that makes the slices possible without fitting into any slice?