Puzzle

Author: Rachel Carley Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 42 of The Interior Architecture Theory Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge) Raw file: raw/chapters/carley-2018-puzzle.md

Summary

Carley examines how constraints can be deployed "to activate the interior and its contents in rich and variegated detail," proposing that Georges Perec's Oulipian methods of literary construction — most famously in Life A User's Manual — open a discourse on how interior architecture can be taught: by superimposing voluntary, "second order" constraints over the discipline's primary constraints (brief, budget, codes, site, and the conventions of plans, sections, elevations, and perspectives) to generate innovative designs. Reading the constraint apparatus of Life (the knight's tour, the orthogonal Latin bi-square, the clinamen) alongside Saul Steinberg's The Art of Living and the Bartlebooth puzzle-plot, Carley argues that Perec's interiors — rooms activated by objects with itinerant histories rather than by psychological characterization — model a design-pedagogical method: the studio as the site of rule-governed, playful "potential space" that operates "against the myth of inspiration."

Key Claims

Constraints are inherent in media of representation; interior architecture already works under multiple primary constraints — the project brief, budgets, building codes, site exigencies, and the representational conventions of plan, section, elevation, and perspective.
A further layer of voluntary, "second order" constraints can be superimposed on these primary constraints, and "an artful and systematic manipulation" of them "can allow ample scope for innovation" — the chapter's central proposal is 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."
Oulipo (founded 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais) pursued literary form through rigorous constraint, appropriating formal patterns from mathematics, logic, and chess, on the belief that "systems of formal constraint – far from restricting a writer – actually affords a field of creative liberty."
Oulipian innovation operated "against the myth of literary inspiration, offering an alternative to types of literature produced by force of habit"; the success of Oulipian creativity was dependent on "the difficulty of the problem and the elegance of the solution."
Perec's Life is modelled on Saul Steinberg's drawing The Art of Living (1952) — a boarding-house sectional perspective with the facade peeled away, residents and belongings exposed at one moment in time — the apartment building at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier is that drawing novelized.
The jigsaw puzzle is the governing metaphor: "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" — each chapter is a puzzle piece of a larger picture.
Bartlebooth's Sisyphean quest (500 seascapes painted in 500 ports, converted to jigsaws by Winckler, reassembled over twenty years, then dissolved in detergent until "nothing else is left but blank paper") is "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."
Perec's use of the clinamen (from Epicurean theory: "The world functions because from the outset there is of a lack of balance") acknowledges that "even the most exquisitely designed master plan cannot avoid factors outside of its control, such as death" — constraints must include their own error.
Two formal constraints scaffold Life: the knight's tour of a ten-by-ten (stories × rooms) chessboard determines chapter sequence; the "orthogonal Latin bi-square order 10" — twenty-one bi-squares, forty-two lists, "420 'things' to distribute, forty-two to a box (and never the same forty-two twice)" — distributes heterogeneous elements (interior details, objects, furnishings, situations, literary allusions, quotations) across chapters; nineteen of the forty-two specifications describe interior architecture, furnishings, surface finishes, fabrics, and objects.
Each of the ninety-nine chapters opens with a detailed description of a room; objects carry "itinerant histories" through which "the reader begins to learn small, personal details about the residents" — the psychological interiors of the characters are deliberately not excavated; characterization is indirect, object-mediated (Bellos: Perec "gives the reader virtually no access to the inner lives of its named characters").
Perec utilizes Situationist strategies of detournement and collage, "sampling existing texts and organizing them into new formal relationships"; each chapter also references one of Perec's other writings and an activity, event, or object he experienced while writing it.
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" — a condensation mimicked in students' digital transactions "to glean a diverse arsenal of research materials," where "private interiors have never been more open to public scrutiny."
Carley reports two studios she built on Life: Intérieur (critically examining the novel, foregrounding "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") and Natura Morta: Architectures of Still Life (investigating how domestic objects and the genre of still life "could function as catalysts in the formation of innovative interior spaces," including a twenty-five-model iterative exercise generating hybrid forms from three initial concept models: research question, site/context position, and a design detail gleaned from research).
The proposed studio method: "second order" constraints as "an armature that coordinates and quantifies spatial, material, technological, and theoretical information" — compulsory spatial gestures, events, situations, objects, materials, and drawing/modeling notations supplied by student or tutor — requiring each student to develop a design methodology to weave the multivalent strands together.
The collection of constraint materials "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."
Life challenges conventional hierarchies between objects and rooms, between contents and containers, and — pointedly — "invites us to reconsider the hierarchies that exist between the interior architect and the interior decorator, making these discriminations not so clear-cut."
The novel 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."
Warren Motte's observation that Perec "severely questions such traditional distinctions as that between structure and theme" becomes a design lesson: concepts can be "embedded into the material details of a project," and second-order constraints offer "multilayered interior design propositions that acknowledge the complexities inherent in the inception, development, and occupation of a project over time."
Enrique Walker's Columbia University seminars and design studios on architecture and constraint, "looking towards Perec's writings for inspiration," are cited as the architectural precedent for the Perec-as-studio-method approach — while "scant scholarship to date" addresses how Perec "exploits constraints to fabricate interiors that reconceptualize the relationships between occupants, objects, and rooms."

Connections

Concepts: voluntary-constraints (the chapter's central concept) · oulipo (the group and its method) · clinamen (the built-in error) · potential-space ("potential space," from Potential Literature) · infra-ordinary (the infra-ordinary quoted via Wardrip-Fruin) · still-life (the Natura Morta studio's genre) · habit (the "force of habit" constraint-critique) · play (writing "as practice, as work, as play") · design-studio-pedagogy (the studio as experimental site) · experiential-learning (practice-based enquiry) · detournement (Perec's Situationist sampling) · interior-as-biography (objects' itinerant histories as partial biography) · interiority (psychological interiors withheld) · politicizing-the-interior ("not neutral but highly inflected spaces") · trace (Bartlebooth's erasure: "No trace would remain") · domestic-interior (the apartment building as puzzle) · interior-architecture (the primary/second-order constraint structure) · interior-design (the architect/decorator hierarchy challenged) · everyday-life ("ordinary rituals and performances of everyday life" as the constraint material) · conceptual-models (the 25-model iterative exercise) · narrative-space (the novel's architectonic structure) · rule-breaking (anticonstraint: the system "must 'creak' a bit")

Authors: Georges Perec — the chapter's subject, not its author; his Life A User's Manual is the analyzed work · Gregory Marinic — editor of the Reader (see log for cited figures: Enrique Walker, Warren Motte, Queneau, Le Lionnais, Steinberg, Bellos, Mitchell, Wardrip-Fruin)

Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture (Position AG: the interior architect/decorator hierarchy declared "not so clear-cut") · theory-of-the-everyday (the everyday as studio material: extraordinary events and ordinary rituals)

Related source notes: Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash (Spuybroek 2025) — Spuybroek reads Life's gameboard and Knight's Tour from the inhabitation side, the chapter's literary-analysis counterpart · Cultural Phenomenology and the Everyday (Clucas 2000) — Perec's infra-ordinary inventories · Unitary Urbanism (Andreotti 1999) — the Situationist play-tactics Perec borrows · Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology (Smith 2018) — the Reader's other studio-pedagogy chapter (Ch. 21)

Direct Quotes

"This chapter examines how constraints can be deployed to activate the interior and its contents in rich and variegated detail."

"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."

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

"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."

"They were of the belief that 'systems of formal constraint – far from restricting a writer – actually affords a field of creative liberty.'"

"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."

"Thus, the success of Oulipian creativity was dependent upon 'the difficulty of the problem and the elegance of the solution.'"

"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.'"

"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.'"

"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."

"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."

"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." (with Epicurean theory quoted: "The world functions because from the outset there is of a lack of balance")

"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'" (n. 18, quoting Perec in Motte, Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, pp. 19–20)

"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." (n. 20, quoting Peta Mitchell)

"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" (n. 20, quoting Mitchell)

"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."

"Perec gives the reader virtually no access to the inner lives of its named characters" (n. 25, quoting Bellos)

"Throughout Life, Perec utilizes situationist strategies of detournement and collage, sampling existing texts and organizing them into new formal relationships." (n. 26)

"Perec's articulation of the space between objects marks a space between significant events – signaling an irruption in spatiotemporal relationships."

"Private interiors have never been more open to public scrutiny."

"Text and image, narrative and still life, the infra-ordinary and the outlandish tale are artfully combined." (quoting Wardrip-Fruin)

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"The use of such systematic, playful processes could irritupt a priori understandings of what might constitute an interior architecture proposition."

"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."

"Perec 'severely questions such traditional distinctions as that between structure and theme'" (quoting Motte)

"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."

"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" (n. 16, quoting Bellos)

"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…" (n. 18, quoting Bellos)

"Perec was utilizing the Oulipian clinamen, a term Perec takes from Epicurean theory."

Open Questions

What would a full "second order" constraint set for an interior architecture studio actually specify? The chapter names the categories (spatial gestures, events, situations, objects, materials, drawing/modeling notations) but reports only the two studios that were "directly and indirectly influenced" by Life — has the Perquian constraint experiment itself been run and evaluated?
The chapter distinguishes constraints that "have little or no bearing upon the narrative development" (the bi-square, via Mitchell) from constraints that structure it (the knight's tour). Which spatial-design constraints play which role — do object-lists govern a design's contents while the circulation diagram governs its sequence, and what happens when the two conflict?
Does the clinamen scale from literary systems to built projects? Perec could omit chapter 66 in print; a built interior's "built-in error" — the site condition, the client's death, the budget shortfall — is not chosen but suffered. Is the design equivalent of the deliberate error the margin deliberately left un-designed?
The chapter claims the constraint method would make students acknowledge "the life of the interior of a building in time" — but constraints freeze their objects as pre-established lists. Can a rule-governed composition remain open to occupation's improvisation (de Certeau's tactics), or does the second-order constraint produce the hyperorganized interior Melchionne diagnosed?
If private interiors "have never been more open to public scrutiny" through students' digital inspiration-searching, is the Oulipian response (arbitrary constraint against inspiration) also a critique of the Pinterest-economy of design research — and does it hold when the digital archive is itself algorithmically constraint-governed?
The Bartlebooth plot makes the master project self-destroying: the novel's constraints are "ultimately abandoned." Is a design education in voluntary constraints an education in how to abandon one's own system well?