The Apartment

Author: Georges Perec Year: 2006 (Intimus printing; excerpted from Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock, Penguin Books, London, 1999, excerpt pp. 27–33; © 1997 John Sturrock. The Perec author page records Species of Spaces as 1974 — the original French Espèces d'espaces year, not stated in this excerpt) Source type: chapter (the Intimus: Interior Design Reader selection, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 259–264) Raw file: raw/chapters/perec-2006-the-apartment.md

Summary

Perec's essayistic enumeration of the apartment — the only text in the wiki's everyday cluster that is Perec's own prose, the primary witness to the method its secondary sources have reported. The essay opens with a deadpan functional definition of rooms ("a bedroom is a room in which there is a bed; a dining-room is a room in which there are a table and chairs, and often a sideboard…"), derives two "elementary" definitions (apartments have a finite number of rooms; each room has a particular function), concedes that it would seem "derisory" to question these "self-evident facts" — and then spends the rest of the essay questioning them. It shows the room as a malleable box, the apartment's "ideal dividing-up" as an "unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral" procedure that assigns each slice of the day to one room (the 07.00–22.00 timetable of the mother, father and child), the equivalence of sitting-room, bedroom and broom closet ("the two functions are the same, of recuperation and maintenance"), and the functionalist's indifference to open planning (the pseudo-modular space merely renames rooms as cooking-, sleeping- and eating-areas). It then proposes four alternative principles of apartment layout: functional relationships between rooms (the reception en suite of the eighteenth-century town house and fin-de-siècle bourgeois apartment); the functioning of the senses (the gustatorium and auditory; the unimaginable seery, smellery and feelery); heptadian rhythms (the seven-room apartment of Mondayery to Sundayery, already half-realized in the weekend home); and thematic arrangements "roughly analogous to that which used to exist in brothels" (the boat-Mondayery, the Pole-or-Everest Tuesdayery, the Dame Tartine's Palace Wednesdayery).

Key Claims

The functional definition of the room: rooms are defined by the fixtures and furniture they contain — bedroom (bed), dining-room (table, chairs, sideboard), sitting-room (armchairs, couch), kitchen ("a cooker and a water inlet"), bathroom ("a water inlet above a bathtub"), shower-room, cloakroom, entrance-hall ("a room in which at least one of the doors leads outside the apartment"), child's bedroom ("a room into which you put a child"), broom closet, maid's bedroom ("a room that you let to a student"). The room-type is a furniture-inventory before it is an architecture.
Two "elementary" definitions: "1. Every apartment consists of a variable, but finite, number of rooms. 2. Each room has a particular function." The functional theory of the apartment is presented as self-evident — and that self-evidence is the essay's true object: "It would seem difficult, or rather it would seem derisory, to question these self-evident facts."
The room is a box, and therefore malleable: "all rooms are alike, more or less… they're never anything more than a sort of cube, or let's say rectangular parallelepiped. They always have at least one door and also, quite often, a window. They're heated… and fitted with one or two power points… In sum, a room is a fairly malleable space." Function is a superimposition on interchangeable volume — which is why alternative functional divisions are possible at all.
The nycthemeral procedure: "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. The following model is hardly a caricature" — followed by the full 07.00–22.00 timetable routing the mother, father and child through kitchen, bathroom, entrance-hall, dining-room, child's room and sitting-room, quarter-hour by quarter-hour.
The model's double status: the timetable 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)." The nycthemeral day is neither a description nor a prescription alone: it is the norm the design professions live by.
The gendered day: the timetable's three occupants do not share a day. The father's slices are office-hours; 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)"), shopping, cooking, dishes, errands, fetching the child. The apartment's functional order is also a gendered division of labour made temporal.
The hierarchy-flattening equivalence: "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)." Functionalism cannot distinguish the honoured room from the utility space — rest and storage are the same function class.
Open planning changes nothing: the nycthemeral model "would not be modified in any practical way" if the partitioned apartment were replaced by "a purportedly single, pseudo-modular space (living-room, sitting-room, etc.)" — "We would then have, not a kitchen but a cooking-area, not a bedroom but a sleeping-area, not a dining-room but an eating-area." The modernist open plan is functionalism with the partitions removed: same procedure, renamed rooms.
Alternative layout 1 — functional relationships: "an apartment whose layout would depend, no longer on the activities of the day, but on functional relationships between the rooms. That after all was how the so-called reception rooms were divided up ideally in the large town houses of the eighteenth century or the great bourgeois apartments of the fin de siècle: a sequence of drawing-rooms en suite, leading off a large vestibule, whose specification rested on minimal variations all revolving around the notion of reception: large drawing-room, small drawing-room, Monsieur's study, Madame's boudoir, smoking-room, library, billiard-room, etc."
Alternative layout 2 — the senses: "an apartment whose layout was based on the functioning of the senses. 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." The senses supply room-names only up to a point — the coinages expose which senses lack a room, and which rooms lack a sense.
Alternative layout 3 — heptadian rhythms: "It is hardly any more transgressive to conceive of a division based, no longer on circadian, but on heptadian rhythms. This would give us apartments of seven rooms, known respectively as the Mondayery, Tuesdayery, Wednesdayery, Thursdayery, Fridayery, Saturdayery, and Sundayery."
The heptadian rooms already exist — as property: "These two last rooms… already exist in abundance, commercialized under the name of 'second' or 'weekend homes'. It's no more foolish to conceive of a room exclusively devoted to Mondays than to build villas that are only used for sixty days in the year." The market has built the week's end; the week's beginning remains unbuilt.
Heptadianism's historical practice: "The Mondayery could ideally be a laundry-room (our country forebears did their washing on Mondays) and the Tuesdayery a drawing-room (our urban forebears were happy to receive visitors on Tuesdays). This, obviously, would hardly be a departure from the functional." The weekly rhythm was already function; the proposal is only to make it architectural.
Note 2, the circa-annual habitat: "A habitat based on a circa-annual rhythm exists among a few of the 'happy few' who are sufficiently well endowed with residences to be able to attempt to reconcile their sense of values, their liking for travel, climatic conditions and cultural imperatives. They are to be found, for example, in Mexico in January, in Switzerland in February, in Venice in March, in Marrakesh in April, in Paris in May, in Cyprus in June, in Bayreuth in July, in the Dordogne in August, in Scotland in September, in Rome in October, on the Côte d'Azur in November, and in London in December." The rhythm-principle scales from room to season — and its realization is a class privilege.
Alternative layout 4 — thematic arrangements: "It would be better, while we're at it, to imagine a thematic arrangement, roughly analogous to that which used to exist in brothels (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.])." The themed room's genealogy runs through the commercial fantasy-interior, its afterlife as student housing.
The themed rooms specified: "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." Each theme dictates furniture, climate, food, labour — the theme as a total design program.
The text breaks off at "(… p 33)": the excerpt holds only the Mondayery, Tuesdayery and Wednesdayery of the thematic sequence; the Thursdayery through Sundayery are not in the wiki.
The text's own footnote on "unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral" — "This is the best phrase in the whole book!" — a characteristic Perecian flourish flagging the coinage as the essay's methodological core.
The editors' frame: "Georges Perec, renowned for his literary work, takes time to question the banal and mundane activities occurring in the spaces of our inhabitation. In this excerpt he discloses the ordinariness of space when considered alongside functionality of room requirements, particularly when mapped through a slice of time. Against this method of narration, Perec proposes several other spatial 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 Intimus headnote classifies the selection "philosophical / mid 20th century • furnish."

Connections

Concepts: infra-ordinary (the essay is the concept's primary text: the banal apartment questioned against its self-evidence) · everyday-life (the day sliced into rooms is the everyday's spatial form) · nycthemeral (the coined principle) · heptadian (the coined principle) · thematic-arrangement (the coined principle) · time-geography (the timetable as a domestic space-time path; coupling constraints — the shared breakfast, the family supper) · domestic-interior (the apartment as functional division; the room-furniture definition) · dining-room ("a dining-room is a room in which there are a table and chairs, and often a sideboard"; the 12.30 lunch) · kitchen ("a room in which there is a cooker and a water inlet"; the timetable's most-used room) · bathroom ("a water inlet above a bathtub"; shower-room, cloakroom; the toilet timetable) · habit (the day that runs itself through rooms — habit externalized as plan) · repetition (the nycthemeral cycle as the everyday's cyclical repetition, spatially fixed) · voluntary-constraints (the four alternative layout-principles as Perec's own constraint-procedures for space) · flexible-interior (the pseudo-modular space as flexibility that changes nothing) · colonization-of-everyday-life (the planner's day: "it is nevertheless like that, and not otherwise, that architects and town planners see us as living or want us to live") · gender-and-the-interior (the mother's day: housework, shopping, cooking; the father's day: office) · tidying (the broom closet; the vacuum cleaner's circuit through all the rooms) · work-leisure-distinction (office-hours vs. whiled-away evenings: "in short they while away the time") · programming (the timetable as the apartment's functional program in its plainest form) · machine-for-living (the apartment as function-machine) · practiced-place (the essay stands on the "proper"/strategic side: the planned division against which de Certeau's practiced space is defined) · separate-spheres (the gendered temporal division of the same house)

Authors: Georges Perec — the essay's author · Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the Intimus editors framing the selection · Rachel Carley — the constraint-method reading of Perec that this primary text now grounds · Michel de Certeau — the strategy/tactic frame the planned apartment belongs to · Henri Lefebvre — the administered everyday the timetable literalizes · Rita Felski — repetition and home as the everyday's affirmable structure, here at its most scheduled

Debates: theory-of-the-everyday (the everyday as architect's script vs. the playful counter-layouts)

Related source notes: Puzzle (Carley 2018) — the constraint-method reading of Life A User's Manual; this essay supplies the apartment-scale companion · Cultural Phenomenology and the Everyday (Clucas 2000) — the infra-ordinary's philosophical exposition; here its primary text · Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash (Spuybroek 2025) — Species of Spaces read from the inhabitation side · Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — the house ordered by long-standing habits: the timetable is that order's ideal form · Everyday life in the real world (Maycroft 2007) — the time-geography frame the timetable anticipates · Rethinking Everyday Life (Seigworth & Gardiner 2004) — "What is there under your wallpaper?" from the same book · Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the anthology's introduction

Direct Quotes

"A bedroom is a room in which there is a bed; a dining-room is a room in which there are a table and chairs, and often a sideboard; a sitting-room is a room in which there are armchairs and a couch; a kitchen is a room in which there is a cooker and a water inlet; a bathroom is a room in which there is a water inlet above a bathtub; when there is only a shower, it is known as a shower-room; when there is only a wash-basin it is known as a cloakroom; an entrance-hall is a room in which at least one of the doors leads outside the apartment" (p. 259)

"a child's bedroom is a room into which you put a child; a broom closet is a room into which you put brooms and the vacuum cleaner; a maid's bedroom is a room that you let to a student." (p. 259)

"1. Every apartment consists of a variable, but finite, number of rooms. 2. Each room has a particular function." (p. 259)

"It would seem difficult, or rather it would seem derisory, to question these self-evident facts." (p. 259)

"however, all rooms are alike, more or less, and it is no good their trying to impress us with stuff about modules and other nonsense: they're never anything more than a sort of cube, or let's say rectangular parallelepiped. They always have at least one door and also, quite often, a window." (p. 260)

"In sum, a room is a fairly malleable space." (p. 260)

"I don't know, and don't want to know, where functionality begins or ends." (p. 260)

"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. The following model is hardly a caricature" (p. 260)

"07.00 The mother gets up and goes to get breakfast in the KITCHEN" (p. 260)

"08.45 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)

"12.30 The father and the mother have lunch in the [dining-room] (the child is a day boarder)" (p. 261)

"20.30 The father and the mother go into the [sitting-room] they watch television, or else they listen to the radio, or else they play cards, or else the father reads the newspaper while the mother does some sewing, in short they while away the time" (pp. 261–262)

"in this model, which, I would stress, 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)

"on the one hand, 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) and, on the other hand, that my model would not be modified in any practical way if, instead of having, as here, spaces separated by partitions delimiting a bedroom, a sitting-room, a dining-room, a kitchen, etc., we envisaged, as is often done these days, a purportedly single, pseudo-modular space (living-room, sitting-room, etc.). We would then have, 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's not hard to imagine an apartment whose layout would depend, no longer on the activities of the day, but on functional relationships between the rooms. That after all was how the so-called reception rooms were divided up ideally in the large town houses of the eighteenth century or the great bourgeois apartments of the fin de siècle: a sequence of drawing-rooms en suite, leading off a large vestibule, whose specification rested on minimal variations all revolving around the notion of reception: large drawing-room, small drawing-room, Monsieur's study, Madame's boudoir, smoking-room, library, billiard-room, etc." (p. 262)

"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)

"It is hardly any more transgressive to conceive of a division based, no longer on circadian, but on heptadian rhythms. This would give us apartments of seven rooms, known respectively as the Mondayery, Tuesdayery, Wednesdayery, Thursdayery, Fridayery, Saturdayery, and Sundayery." (pp. 262–263)

"These two last rooms, it should be observed, already exist in abundance, commercialized under the name of 'second' or 'weekend homes'. It's no more foolish to conceive of a room exclusively devoted to Mondays than to build villas that are only used for sixty days in the year." (p. 263)

"The Mondayery could ideally be a laundry-room (our country forebears did their washing on Mondays) and the Tuesdayery a drawing-room (our urban forebears were happy to receive visitors on Tuesdays). This, obviously, would hardly be a departure from the functional." (p. 263)

"It would be better, while we're at it, to imagine a thematic arrangement, roughly analogous to that which used to exist in brothels (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 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)

"This is the best phrase in the whole book!" (note 1 on "unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral," p. 263)

"A habitat based on a circa-annual rhythm exists among a few of the 'happy few' who are sufficiently well endowed with residences to be able to attempt to reconcile their sense of values, their liking for travel, climatic conditions and cultural imperatives. They are to be found, for example, in Mexico in January, in Switzerland in February, in Venice in March, in Marrakesh in April, in Paris in May, in Cyprus in June, in Bayreuth in July, in the Dordogne in August, in Scotland in September, in Rome in October, on the Côte d'Azur in November, and in London in December." (note 2, p. 263)

"Georges Perec, renowned for his literary work, takes time to question the banal and mundane activities occurring in the spaces of our inhabitation. In this excerpt he discloses the ordinariness of space when considered alongside functionality of room requirements, particularly when mapped through a slice of time. Against this method of narration, Perec proposes several other spatial layouts generated by either functional relationships between rooms, or the functioning of senses, or days of the week, or thematic arrangements." (Taylor & Preston, editors' headnote, p. 259)

Open Questions

The ontology of the model. The timetable is "fictional and problematic" yet "elementarily right" — neither description nor prescription but the norm the design professions inhabit ("architects and town planners see us as living or want us to live"). What is the design-theoretical status of such a model — and is the right response to it critique, compliance, or Perec's own alternatives?
The unbuilt days. The excerpt breaks off at "(… p 33)" after the Wednesdayery: what would the Thursdayery, Fridayery, Saturdayery and Sundayery thematically be — and does the wiki's truncation matter, or does the pattern already state the principle?
The unimaginable rooms. The gustatorium and auditory can be imagined, but "one might wonder what a seery might look like, or an smellery or a feelery." Is this a failure of language (no room-types exist for these senses to name) or of the senses themselves (smell and touch lack the object-world that builds a room)? Compare the wiki's olfactory sources (aromatopia, heterosmia), which argue the opposite — that smell can build space.
The mother's unlisted day. "(she then goes through all the rooms of the apartment but I forbear from listing them)" — the infra-ordinary method's self-limiting moment: the housework list would be interminable. Is the list's refusal the recognition that some of the everyday cannot be inventoried, only timed?
Parody or proposal? Are the heptadian and thematic alternatives playable reductios (functionalism taken seriously becomes absurd) or genuine design programmes (constraint as generative method)? Carley's reading of Life supports the second; the essay's deadpan supports both.
The class limit of rhythmic living. The weekend home commercialized the heptadian; the circa-annual habitat remains "among a few of the 'happy few'." Is rhythmic architecture structurally aristocratic — the leisure to live by a rhythm other than the working week — or can the principle be democratized?
The timetable and Life. The nycthemeral timetable is a constraint-generated interior at apartment scale; the knight's tour and bi-square generate Life's apartment house at novel scale. Is "The Apartment" the missing bridge between Carley's Perec (the constraint-armature) and the wiki's everyday cluster (the scripted day) — and can the four alternative layout-principles be run as studio constraints, as Carley's second-order armature would require?