Thematic Arrangement

Definition

Thematic arrangement names Perec's fourth and most radical alternative to the apartment's functional division: "It would be better, while we're at it, to imagine a thematic arrangement, roughly analogous to that which used to exist in brothels" (Perec, p. 263). The apartment's rooms are organized not by the day's slices (nycthemeral), not by the week's cycles (heptadian), not by functional relationships between rooms (the reception en suite), but by a theme each room totalizes — a theme that dictates the room's furniture, climate, food and labour. The concept has two parts in the text: the genealogy (the brothel-turned-hostel) and the programme (Perec's own themed rooms).

The genealogy: "after they were shut down, and until the fifties, they were turned into student hostels; several of my friends thus lived in a former 'maison' in the Rue de l'Arcade, one in the 'torture chamber', another in the 'aeroplane' [bed shaped like a cockpit, fake portholes, etc.], a third in the 'trapper's cabin' [walls papered with fake logs, etc.]" (p. 263). The themed room's commercial-fantasy origin — rooms built as scenarios for hire — survives its closure as the students' ordinary housing: the theme outlives the commerce that built it, decaying into the infra-ordinary of student life.

The programme, attached to the heptadian sequence: "The Mondayery, for example, would imitate a boat: you would sleep in hammocks, swab down the floor and eat fish. The Tuesdayery, why not, would commemorate one of Man's great victories over Nature, the discovery of the Pole (North or South, to choice), or the ascent of Everest: the room wouldn't be heated, you would sleep under thick furs, the diet would be based on pemmican (corned beef at the end of the month, dried beef when you're flush). The Wednesdayery would glorify children, obviously, being the day on which, for a long time now, they haven't had to go to school; it could be a sort of Dame Tartine's Palace, gingerbread walls, furniture made from plasticine, etc." (p. 263). Each theme specifies a complete interior program: the boat dictates hammocks, swabbing and diet; the Pole dictates the room's temperature, bedding and budget-graded rations; Dame Tartine dictates architecture itself (gingerbread walls) and furniture's material (plasticine). The theme is thus a total design constraint — the room as a scenario, the apartment as a set of scenarios.

The concept sits in the family of Perec's alternative layout-principles (functional relationships, the functioning of the senses — the gustatorium and auditory, with the unimaginable "seery… smellery… feelery" — heptadian rhythms, thematic arrangements), which Carley's reading of Life A User's Manual generalizes into the Oulipian constraint-method: arbitrary, self-imposed procedures that generate space against the default of habit and function.

Key Thinkers

• Georges Perec — the concept's author (1974/2006): the brothel-hostel genealogy, the boat-Mondayery, the Pole-or-Everest Tuesdayery, the Dame Tartine's Palace Wednesdayery (a Dame Tartine nursery-rhyme reference; "well-known French comptine").
• Rachel Carley — the concept's methodological generalizer (2018): the layout-principles read as Perec's constraint-system, the studio transposition of Potential Literature (voluntary-constraints, potential-space).

Related Concepts

• Heptadian — the concept's immediate predecessor in the essay's sequence: Perec turns from the weekday-rooms to theme as the "better" proposal ("It would be better, while we're at it, to imagine a thematic arrangement…").
• Nycthemeral — the functional-timetable division the thematic arrangement abandons: where the nycthemeral room receives a slice of the day, the thematic room receives a world.
• Voluntary Constraints — the method the thematic arrangement instantiates: the theme as an arbitrary, totalizing constraint that generates furniture, climate, food and labour — the apartment-scale "second order" constraint.
• Tableau — the staged-interior kin: the themed room is a habitable tableau, the room as scene (Meninato's staged interiors; the brothel room as the tableau's commercial ancestor).
• Event Space — the room-as-scenario: the thematic room scripts its occupant's performance (sleeping in hammocks, swabbing the deck, eating fish) — the designed environment as staging.
• Domestic Interior — the concept's site and target: the functional apartment whose division the theme replaces.
• Infra-Ordinary — the genealogy's register: the brothel-hostel shows the themed room decaying into ordinary student housing — fantasy's afterlife as the infra-ordinary.
• Interior Cosmology — the totalizing register: the theme as a room's complete world-program (climate, diet, furniture, labour).
• Surrealist Object — the imagination-family: Perec's gingerbread walls and plasticine furniture are the desire-driven object-world's architectural branch (the wiki's surrealism cluster).
• Hyperorganized Environment — the theme's disciplining edge: the boat-Mondayery's swabbing and the Pole-Tuesdayery's rations are the tidying and rationing the theme commands.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Apartment (Perec 1974/2006) — the concept's founding text: the brothel-hostel genealogy (the Rue de l'Arcade 'torture chamber', 'aeroplane', 'trapper's cabin'; p. 263); the boat-Mondayery, Pole/Everest-Tuesdayery, Dame Tartine's Palace-Wednesdayery programme (p. 263); the place of the thematic in the four-principle sequence (editors, p. 259).
• Puzzle (Carley 2018) — the methodological frame that generalizes Perec's layout-principles into the constraint-armature: the "second order" constraints (compulsory spatial gestures, events, situations, objects) whose apartment-scale precedent is the thematic room (see voluntary-constraints).

Open Questions

• Is the themed room ironic or programmatic? The brothel genealogy suggests parody (the theme as commercial fantasy), the specificity of the programmes suggests seriousness (the theme as generative constraint). Perec's deadpan holds both — is that doubleness the concept's method?
• Why does the genealogy run through the brothel? The themed room's origin is a space of commercialized fantasy for hire — what does it mean for design theory that the "purest" thematic arrangement in the domestic tradition was built for sale and decayed into student housing?
• The sensory apartment is the thematic arrangement's failed sibling: "We can imagine well enough what a gustatorium might be, or an auditory, but one might wonder what a seery might look like, or an smellery or a feelery" (p. 262). Why can taste and hearing build rooms while sight, smell and touch cannot be named into one — and do the wiki's olfactory sources (aromatopia, heterosmia) refute Perec's imaginative block, or confirm it (smell builds atmosphere, not rooms)?
• The excerpt breaks off at "(… p 33)" after the Wednesdayery: what would the Thursdayery, Fridayery, Saturdayery and Sundayery thematically be — and does the truncation matter, or does the pattern already state the principle?
• The theme dictates labour as well as furniture (swabbing the deck, the budget-graded rations, the child's plasticine): is the thematic arrangement a design method or a discipline — the room that scripts its occupant — and how does it differ from the nycthemeral timetable it opposes?