C H APTER 10

The Architecture of Constraint

and Forgetting
Sandra Kaji-O’Grady

ARC HITECTURE AND ITS INFATUATIONS WITH

PH ILOSOPHERS AND WRITERS

E ach of the major thinkers of the late twentieth century engages architecture
in some way, be that as subject, metaphor, evidence or ground. Fredric
Jameson discerns in the Bonaventure Hotel the evidence of epistemic change,
as does Peter Sloterdijk with the Crystal Palace.1 Roland Barthes finds the
Eiffel Tower an exemplary artefact for understanding mythology, and Jacques
Derrida elaborates deconstruction through Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la
Villette and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. In turn, contemporary archi-
tects have demonstrated a voracious appetite for ideas from philosophers and
writers, employing these as inspiration for design as much as for their explica-
tory potential on metaphysical, epistemological or aesthetic questions. Indeed,
the past fifty years are coloured by architecture’s successive engagements with
continental and critical thought. Derrida’s influence upon mainstream archi-
tecture begins with his 1982 collaboration with Peter Eisenman for the Parc de
la Villette competition, reaches its zenith in the Deconstructivist Architecture
exhibition at MOMA in 1988, and, in 2012, he is the subject of a conference
that ‘hopes to re-establish the connections’ with his work.2 Bernard Cache’s
Earth Moves3 saw the first applied investigation of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of
the ‘fold’ in architecture, yet, by the 2004 special issue of Architecture Design
on ‘Folding in Architecture’,4 such Deleuzian concepts as the ‘fold’, ‘smooth
space’ and ‘faciality’ had been reduced to ‘a prescriptive repertoire of formal
manoeuvres’.5
These transactions have some enduring legacy after architects have
exhausted  the formal tropes generated by their readings of each thinker or

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172  s a nd r a kaj i- o ’grady

writer. There is a healthy industry in explaining (or advocating) specific

thinkers to subsequent generations, exemplified in Routledge’s ‘Thinkers
for Architects’ series. Launched in 2007 with Deleuze and Guattari for
Architects by Andrew Ballantyne, it includes titles on Henri Lefebvre, Charles
Goodman, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Walter
Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Homi K. Bhabha, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, and Martin Heidegger. A volume on Paul Virilio is
forthcoming. In a similar vein, albeit slimmer, Leopold Lambert’s 2013
‘Funambulist Pamphlets’, published by Punctum Books, include volumes
on Michel Foucault, Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze. Those whose
architectural shadows are longest have attracted multiple retrospective texts.
Deleuze, for example, is the subject of Deleuze and Space, Architecture for a
Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari at the Horizon of the Real, Deleuze and
Architecture, Deleuze and Guattari on Architecture6 and innumerable essays and
conferences.
Georges Perec is the worthy subject of the present book, which assesses
his impact across several cultural domains, yet at this point it is inconceivable
that he would be graced with a title in the ‘Thinkers for Architects’ series. Is
it that his writings on space and the city are too literary or oblique? Is it that
they have yet to be introduced to an architectural audience? Did his early death
mean that there is insufficient material to warrant a retrospective? None of the
above is a plausible reason for his relative scarcity in architectural discourse.
Architects have never been put off by the literary or poetic. James Joyce, Franz
Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, among others, have each been
enjoyed for their experimentation, their references to architecture, and their
views on the city. Kafka’s The Castle is the undisguised model for architect
Ricardo Bofill’s housing project, El Castell. Kafka has been a popular reference
point, too, in architectural education, ‘because the narrative space in Kafka’s
texts has ambiguous, incomplete, non-functional, non-geometric and unusual
peculiarities that allow students to explore and experience space in new ways’.7
Calvino has also been heavily mined by architects, notably Rem Koolhaas and
Bernard Tschumi, and his ongoing appeal is borne out by ‘the presence on
architecture and urbanology syllabuses, for instance, of his seminal Invisible
Cities’.8 The counter-utopias imagined by the Italian radical architects and
the French megastructuralists of the 1960s are reflected in Calvino’s imagined
cities, especially those that levitate. In turn, Calvino’s fictional ‘cities’ have
spawned architectural fantasies.
Calvino was a friend of architectural historian Joseph Rykwert and urban
planner Gianni Celati, and also Perec.9 Calvino regarded Perec’s 1978 Life A
User’s Manual to be ‘the last real “event” in the history of the novel so far’.10
In his discussion of Life, Calvino stressed the fact that ‘for Perec, the construc-
tion of a novel according to fixed rules, to constraints, by no means limited his

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t h e a r c h i t ecture o f co ns traint an d forgettin g  173

freedom as a storyteller, but stimulated it’.11 Like Perec, Calvino substitutes

a conventional narrative or plot in his novels with a rigorous structure that he
likens to its architecture, so much so that he admits that in The Castle of Crossed
Destinies, ‘the architecture is the book itself’.12 Unlike Calvino, Perec has inspired
choreography and art, but not – as far as I know – works of architecture.13 This
relative disinterest is anomalous given the architectonic structure of his writ-
ings, the detailed attention given to buildings and cities, his Parisian pedigree,
his friendships with influential thinkers in architecture and urbanism such as
Virilio, Lefebvre and Calvino, and, of course, the appetite the architectural
discipline has for writing that offers fresh perspectives on questions of space and
inhabitation. It is even more curious given that his posthumous introduction to
an English-speaking architectural audience was so extraordinarily auspicious.

PEREC ’ S P OST H UMOUS GRAND DEBUT IN

ARC HITECTURE
In 2002, issues 45 and 46 of AA Files – the journal of the Architecture
Association, one of the most significant venues of architectural discourse since
its launch in 1981 – were dedicated to the author. It was titled ‘P is for Perec and
Paris’. It was in the AA Files that Derrida’s critique of Tschumi’s competition-
winning project for La Villette, ‘Point de Folie – Maintenant l’Architecture’,
brought the philosopher a new audience in 1986. The journal was also the
venue for Paul Hirst’s attempt, in 1993, to remedy the neglect of Foucault ‘in
obvious contrast to [. . .] his contemporary Jacques Derrida’ in ‘Foucault and
Architecture’.14 These essays fuelled the development of a sustained architec-
tural discourse around each philosopher.15 Despite the unprecedented dedica-
tion of a whole issue – indeed, a double issue – it failed to generate further
interest in Perec among architects. His ‘failure to launch’ in the discipline can
be ascribed partly to bad timing and partly to the way in which Perec’s work
was presented. It is worth revisiting this double issue to locate those moments
where Perec’s oeuvre may yet find fertile ground in architecture.
Perec’s appearance in AA Files appears to be prompted by the publication
in English of Life A User’s Manual in 1996 and Species of Spaces in 1997. These
had generated interest among a small circle of architects who contributed to
the double issue. William Firebrace, an architect, academic and graduate of the
AA had earlier in 2002 e-published his first book, Specious Spacious, based on
Perec’s prose. Enrique Walker was a doctoral student at the AA, undertaking
a thesis on Perec’s Lieux project that he completed in 2012.16 It likely helped
also that the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs financially supported the
publication and that its editor at the time, Mark Rappolt, now co-editor of Art
Review, had trained as an art historian not as an architect.17

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174  s a nd r a kaj i- o ’grady

The two volumes centre on four pieces from the abandoned work, Lieux
(Places), begun in 1969 and translated and published here for the first
time: ‘Scene in Italie’, ‘Glances at Gaîté’, ‘Comings and Goings in rue de
l’Assomption’ and ‘Stances on Mabillon’. These are interspersed with texts
and photographs by others that veer from hagiography to homage. Harry
Mathews, Jacques Roubaud, Jacques Jouet, Hugo Brandt Corstius, Marcel
Bénabou and Ian Monk – most of whom were fellow members of the Oulipo –
contribute original prose. Terry Smith (who confesses that he had never heard
of Perec before the commission) writes a travel diary ostensibly in the style
of Lieux. There are interviews with Paul Virilio and Pierre Getzler. Urbanist
and philosopher, Virilio, met Perec in 1971 when on the editorial board of the
new journal Cause Commune. Virilio went on to commission Species of Spaces
for his book series L’Espace critique. Virilio reports that conversations had
with his friend always took place while walking so that they ‘never condensed
into anything face-to-face. But continued side by side.’18 Getzler participated
with Perec in a small group of intellectuals called La Ligne générale and took
photographs of and for Perec. He admits that Perec ‘didn’t really know what
he wanted’ from the photographs he instructed Getzler to take of Mabillon.19
If Perec’s ambition was ‘flat writing’, this is not what is returned to him in the
AA Files, for it is coloured by personal recollections.
The Lieux project centred on twelve Parisian locations. Each was to be
described in situ in one month and once again from memory, according to an
algorithmic constraint, so that no place was described twice in the same month.
Each of these writings was to be sealed in a dated and labelled envelope. The
intention was to open the archived writings twelve years later (when each place
had been written about once in each month), but Perec abandoned the incom-
plete project in 1975. Lieux was meant to register three kinds of ageing, ‘The
aeging of places, the aeging of my writing, and the ageing of my memories.’20
The pieces published in the AA Files reveal only part of this ambition. The
city – its fabric, people, goods and comings and goings – are recounted along-
side his own movements and memories. Buildings are frequently described in
terms of changes that have taken place or appear to be underway. Take the fol-
lowing, for example, ‘No. 7: A small private house. It is difficult to tell whether
it is being done up or demolished.’21
Perec seemed to want to reveal ordinary facts without embellishment.
Moving systematically along each street, he avoided undue attention on
one site over another, or any obvious act of authorial selection or exclusion.
Naming each address in turn ensures the reader understands this self-imposed
method. We also are left in no doubt as to its burden on the author. At one
point, as he attempts to record each of the posters and flyers on the hoarding
of a building site, Perec resorts to ‘etc.’, confessing ‘I’m sick of noting them
all down’. The reader is also likely to falter in the face of the sheer prolifera-

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t h e a r c h i t ecture o f co ns traint an d forgettin g  175

tion of facts. As Gilbert Adair wonders, ‘why does Perec bother recording any
of these minutiae; or rather, from the reader’s own point of view, why am I
bothering to read such a book?’22 The point of the meticulous descriptions is
that while they imply the possibility of an exhaustive inventory, at the same
it is made clear that this ambition is unfulfillable. There is no encompassing
truth by which to capture the heterogeneity of the city. Perec’s city is without
‘scents, no urine, no sounds, no shouts [. . .] he’s in a silent film, and it’s in
black and white’.23 Getzler suspects that, for Perec, the objects he observes are
merely ‘pegs, where you can hang quotations, memories’.24 This may be so,
but the personal memories are described in the same indifferent tone as inert
objects, for example, ‘the flat where Martine Carol used to live’, or ‘no. 18 is
where my aunt and uncle used to live’.25

MISREADINGS AND REREADINGS

Perec’s sociological concerns are less evident in Lieux than in other writings,
although the project does exhibit an underlying anxiety around the destruction
of the city. As Kate Morris observes, one of the limitations of literary scholar-
ship on Perec is that it ‘has tended to focus on memory and writing rather than
his sociological concerns about space and the peculiar way they are written’.26
Morris finds it ‘striking [. . .] the extent to which space and urban geography
are taken as givens in literary studies of Perec’s work’.27 Morris laments that
Perec’s desire to preserve the past and bear witness is too quickly tied to the
author’s personal experience of the Holocaust, thus defusing its wider chal-
lenge. It is easy to see why this occurs. Perec himself described writing as a
battle against forgetting:

To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to

survive: to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave
somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.28

Alternatively, the Lieux are dismissed as ‘wearisome and futile reproductions

of urban space that do not speak to larger literary or cultural issues’.29
For Morris, a more apt reading is that Perec’s writings ‘emphasize the
perpetual un-becoming of those spaces themselves in contrast to an equally
prevalent discourse of urban development that is also found in the texts’.30
The texts reveal an essential truth about cities rather than a personal pathol-
ogy. His recording of the advertisements, posters and public texts embedded
in the city expose conflicting discourses of ownership and inhabitation. They
show the myriad objects and texts competing for our attention and unsettling
our sense of a coherent place. Perec makes salient that ‘the dialectical obverse

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176  s a nd r a kaj i- o ’grady

of “making new” is the process of disintegration and un-becoming that makes

development projects necessary and which also inevitably follows them’.31 He
reminds us that destruction and decay are the necessary pre-conditions for
what architectural theorist and historian Francesca Hughes satirically calls ‘the
anti-entropic duties of the architect’.32
Yet, these lessons for architects are not brought out in the special issue. In
the preface, Andrew Leak asks, ‘What can these texts mean to us today?’ But
his attempt at an answer does not refer to what they might mean outside of
literature. Perec is presented here as if he is essentially interested in writing,
and only one aspect of his writing is made apparent. Perec outlined four modes
in which he wrote: sociological, autobiographical, ludic and fictive. The frag-
ment of his writing in the special issue, however, does not reveal this range of
interests to the novice reader. His oeuvre, narrowed to the Lieux fragments, is
reduced to a lesson in the acute and systematic observation of the city, its build-
ings and material ephemera. For architects, reading literature, or ‘reading’ the
quotidian world, is invariably premised as a precursor for action in it. It is dif-
ficult to see how a projective trajectory could be derived from these texts, even
if readers discern that their overriding message is the inevitability of the cycle
of destruction and development.33 Faced with texts that Perec himself had
abandoned, and with no discussion as to how they might be of use in making
the city, it is unlikely that many were tempted to delve further into his oeuvre.
It is extremely unlikely, too, that architectural audiences encountered alter-
native views on the potential significance of Perec in the field. Morris’s essay,
‘Perec’s Alternative Topography’,34 was published in a short-lived journal for
the visual arts by postgraduate students at the University of California, Irvine.
She was an English literature graduate working as an editor in Canada. Peta
Mitchell’s ‘Constructing the Architext: Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual’
was published in the Canadian literary journal Mosaic and, at the time of pub-
lication, Mitchell was a lecturer in English at the University of Queensland.
Both authors and their essays were far from the geographical and disciplinary
centres of architectural discourse.
Mitchell notes that, from the mid-1970s, in both architecture and literature,
the concept of a unified work was replaced with that of ‘textuality’ – ‘parody and
citationality became key concepts, and, moreover, both came to be informed by
a kind of Lyotardian game theory’.35 She argues that Perec’s novel, Life A User’s
Manual, departs from the French tradition of drawing upon architecture for its
verisimilitude so as to provide a kind of grounding. The novel is not a search
for the real but, rather ironically, ‘denies the very possibility of originality’.36
It is, for Mitchell, the quintessential ‘architext’, a book in which structure and
theme, book and building, are one. She describes how the constraints Perec
uses to structure the novel – the ten-by-ten chessboard-like grid of the apart-
ment building, the knight’s tour through the apartment and the hundred-year

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t h e a r c h i t ecture o f co ns traint an d forgettin g  177

time frame for the novel – have their parallel in the totalising plans of architects
and urbanists, such as Georges-Eugène Haussman, within whose grid the
Parisian apartment building is set. The difference is that, whereas totalising
architecture is doomed to failure, Perec’s system of constraints fails by design.
Its failure is an opening for the reader and for order and chaos, and the ideal and
the quotidian, to rub productively against each other.
Hughes, revisiting Life A User’s Manual in 2014, follows David Bellos,
the book’s translator, in considering the novel a kind of ‘machine’ that writes
the book. She compares Perec’s literary machine with the debates that have
taken place in biology over the relationship between DNA as information and
RNA as material. The ‘looped architecture’ of instruction and perambula-
tion in Perec’s lesser-known The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of
Department to Submit a Request for a Raise – in which Perec appropriates a
computing flowchart – Hughes finds to be comparable with current under-
standings of biological coding. It does away with the distinction between
process and product. Hughes writes:

The revival of observation [. . .] not only drew the newly observing
molecular biologist away from the hegemony of genetic determinism but
brought back the spectacle of the phenomena and, with it, the value of
the particular [. . .]37

Hughes’ book is a rather wild detour itself between the general and the par-
ticular, in which Perec serves an argument against precision in architecture
that is already made and won well before Perec makes an appearance in the
text.

ARC HITECTURAL DESIGN AND COMP OSITIONAL

CONSTRAINTS
Perec’s engagement with compositional constraints has obvious synergies and
attractions for architecture that have been taken up by just one architect at the
heart of the discipline – Walker, formerly the doctoral student at the AA who
had interviewed Virilio for the double issue. Now (at the time of writing) at
the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia
University, Walker tests the Oulipian method in his design teaching. In a
studio series entitled ‘Under Constraint’ (2003–6), students examine the use
of self-imposed constraints. In the subsequent studio series, ‘The Dictionary
of Received Ideas’ (ongoing since 2006), students ‘examine received ideas
– in other words, ideas which have been depleted of their original intensity
due to recurrent use’.38 Through the deliberate use (or misuse) of familiar

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178  s a nd r a kaj i- o ’grady

design operations and conceptual strategies, the goal is to open up otherwise

precluded possibilities for architectural design and architectural theory. It is
played as a game in rounds of three in which the building blocks are three,
seemingly incompatible, received ideas from which the students develop a
hybrid and unexpected outcome. The results can be seen in Figures 10.1, 10.2
and 10.3.
In ‘Under Constraint’ (2010), Walker lists the numerous writers and
filmmakers who have worked productively with predetermined constraints,
including Perec, before proposing:

Subjected by definition to a regime of external forces, architecture has

dismissed self-imposed constraints as a productive device. While it has
overly submitted to a practice of problem-solving, it has demonized
any constraint as a limitation to architectural imagination. Architecture
tolerates voluntary constraints only when these forces appear as feeble,
yet, used to a regime of dependency, still masking them ultimately under
a narrative of necessity, and in so doing hindering their potential. The
practice of self-imposed (and therefore arbitrary) constraints entails
deliberately formulating the problem; an uncompromising decision
which, if properly calibrated, may release otherwise unexpected paths of
production.39

Further:

Self-imposed – and therefore arbitrary – constraints can potentially

mobilize the forces of architectural imagination. Not only do they grant
great freedom; if properly calibrated, they can also release otherwise
unenvisaged paths of production.40

Walker’s belief that architects have dismissed the introduction of composi-

tional constraints is not entirely true and his case would be much stronger if
he used the work of his predecessors as evidence. While there is no equivalent
in architecture of music’s Total Serialism or literature’s Oulipo, and although
Perec may not be the direct source, he has had his fellow travellers in the
design discipline. These span from Walter Netsch and John Hejduk in the
1960s to Eisenman and Tschumi in the 1970s and 1980s, to the parametric
architecture of the 1990s. I will describe each briefly.
Netsch is an architect both misunderstood and largely forgotten. Netsch
joined SOM – a large American commercial practice not given over to the
fanciful – in 1947. He was a maverick there and soon had his own autonomous
studio away from SOM headquarters.41 His first significant project at SOM
was the United Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. To this, Netsch

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SECTIONS
1
Togok Towers
Dancing Towers
MVRDV
World Trade Center
FOA
World Trade Center KISSING
OMA/Koolhaas FOA
Seul, South Corea
Donau, Austria New York New York TOWERS
1996 1996 2002 2002

OMA
2
WTC HSBC Bank Petronas Towers Togok Towers World Trade Center Museum Plaza COLLAGE
REX/Ramus
M. Yamakasi
New York
Norman Foster
Hong Kong
Cesar Pelli
Kuala Lumpur
OMA/Koolhaas
Seul, South Corea
FOA
New York Louisville, KY TOWERS
1973 1985 1998 1996 2002 2005

3
Max Reinhardt Haus
Peter Eisenman
CCTV
OMA/ Koolhaas
ANOMALIES
Berlin, Germany Beijing, China
Figure 10.1  Student Lluis Alexandre Casanovas Blanco’s work from Enrique Walker’s Spring 2012 Advanced Architecture Studio IV The Dictionary
1992 1992
of Received Ideas, at the GSAPP.
Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 10.2  Students Emanuel Admassu, Lluis Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Idan Naor and Eduardo Rega Calvo’s work from Enrique Walker’s
Spring 2012 Advanced Architecture Studio IV The Dictionary of Received Ideas, at the GSAPP.
Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 10.3  Students Laura Buck, Myung Shin Kim, Alejandro Stein and Rui Wang’s work from Enrique Walker’s Spring 2014 Advanced
Architecture Studio IV The Dictionary of Received Ideas, at the GSAPP.
182  s a nd r a kaj i- o ’grady

applied a proportioning system based on a seven-foot module, which he sub-

sequently developed into something he called field theory. Field theory was a
departure from the Miesian aesthetic of SOM, but shared with it the assump-
tion, even insistence, that any project site be empty before design work begins.
As Netsch explains, ‘Field theory can’t or won’t deal with existing context, it
needs to makes [sic] its own fresh start. The operative ground condition for
field theory is tabula rasa.’42 More specifically, field theory was a solipsistic
method for ordering space and architectural elements according to a consist-
ent repetition or modularity. It entailed the establishment of predetermined
parameters and their internal relationships. Netsch insisted that, ‘Correctly
developed, the diminution of choice ceases to be limiting in character, but
rather becomes the refined crystallization of the creative art.’43 Field theory
became associated with Netsch’s favourite formal device – the rotated square,
repeated and overlapped at multiple scales.
The consequences of maintaining an overarching ‘continuous proportional
system’ sometimes impacted on functionality.44 Librarian William Jones
describes Netsch’s Behavioural Sciences building at the University of Illinois
as aesthetically unified but possessing a ‘bewildering layout’ and as ‘a maze of
confusing interior corridors and awkwardly shaped offices’.45 Jones believes
that the subordination of function to Netsch’s rigid geometry was averted
at the Northwestern’s Science-Engineering Library because of the planning
committee’s insistence on functional space. He advocates that other librar-
ians keep a tight reign on their architects.46 Possibly even those buildings
untouched by forceful client committees were something of a compromise for
Netsch, and he sought a purer realisation for field theory. This came in the
invention of a ‘design game’ for which he was granted a patent in March 1987 –
US 4651993 Design game and modules for use therein. The game uses a plurality
of series of flat pieces of the same shape – equilateral polygons – ­progressive
in size and of a predetermined number. The size progression is precisely
determined. The game is essentially an educational puzzle intended to allow
children to produce an unlimited number of abstract or quasi-representational
designs of ‘pleasing aesthetic effect’.47 Netsch’s approach is something like the
structure of Life, minus the life. The abundant contents of each apartment –
the life that threatens to spill over its constraining order at any time – delighted
Perec but repulsed Netsch.
In the mid-1950s, while teaching at the University of Texas in Austin, archi-
tect John Hejduk developed a design puzzle for his students of working within
the self-imposed cage of a nine-square grid. Hejduk’s 9SG exercise quickly
became de rigueur for students in the early years of architectural education
where the elimination of programme, materiality and site made the problem
tightly focused and, like Netsch’s game, highly abstract and aesthetically pleas-
ing. Hedjuk described the 9SG as ‘one of the classic, open-ended problems’,

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t h e a r c h i t ecture o f co ns traint an d forgettin g  183

reductive and constraining, but also capable of generating infinite scenarios.48

In his own work, Hejduk explored the potential of designing through the
reductive context of an abstract plan diagram and a limited kit of parts in the
Texas Series of houses (1954–63) and the Diamond Series (1962­–7). Hejduk
was influenced, through his colleagues Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, by
Rudolf Wittkower’s 1949 argument that Palladio’s eighteenth-century villas
were based on a similar consistent organisational schema – suggesting that self-
imposed formal constraints have a long history in architecture.49
Subsequent experiments by Eisenman in his House projects (1967–75)
draw heavily on Hejduk, and are equally informed by a group of artists who in
1967 and 1968 were experimenting with serial methods, Sol LeWitt in particu-
lar but also Donald Judd and Mel Bochner. Eisenman’s parallel experiments in
architecture get caught up in a lively discourse around architectural represen-
tation, meaning and authorship. In The Architectural Uncanny (1992), Anthony
Vidler suggests two different ways of understanding Eisenman’s houses. One
is to the see the series of projects as ‘an exercise in the rational exploration of
certain pre-established formal constructs: a self-conscious logical sequence
with a beginning and an end’.50 Alternatively, Vidler proposes that it is plau-
sible to see them as ‘posed self-consciously against anthropomorphic analo-
gies, closed formal systems and functionalist derivations’, in such a way that
these designs ‘overturn the classical system of representation’.51 Others were
affronted. Critics deride his serial houses as mere sculpture because they do
not derive their purpose from the function or meaning of inhabitation and the
logical processes of building. Michael Sorkin finds House El Even Odd to be
far ‘from any reasonable standard of legibility as habitable architecture’ and
dismisses them as socially irresponsible, culturally irrelevant and arbitrary.52
Undeterred, in his design for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe, Eisenman more directly evokes both LeWitt and Perec and links the
predetermined constraint with the banal and inherent chaos. He writes:

The context of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is the

enormity of the banal. The project manifests the instability inherent in
what seems to be a system, here a rational grid, and its potential for dis-
solution in time. It suggests that when a supposedly rational and ordered
system grows too large and out of proportion to its intended purpose, it
in fact loses touch with human reason. It then begins to reveal the innate
disturbances and potential for chaos in all systems of seeming order, the
idea that all closed systems of a closed order are bound to fail.53

The grid is a consistent formal trope in Perec’s, Hejduk’s and Eisenman’s

compositions. It is an initial means of production that guides the viewer
through the work but, at the same time, is under constant deformation. As

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184  s a nd r a kaj i- o ’grady

much as the grid holds or structures it produces movement across itself. The
grid is also found in Tschumi’s 1986 design for the Parc de la Villette with its
superimposition of three principles of organisation: a grid of points that locate
the follies, the axial lines of circulation and the expansive neutral surfaces
of the park. Tschumi proposes that the transformational sequence entailed by
the design process is based on a ‘precise, rational set of transformational rules
and discrete architectural elements’.54 He likens this process of recombining
fragments through a ‘series of permutations’ to the writings of Queneau and
Perec.55 Claiming to avoid ‘pure formalism’, Tschumi subjects space, move-
ment, form and programme to a set of mechanical operations in which each
parameter is independent, proposing ‘as sequences of events do not depend on
spatial sequences (and vice versa), both can form independent systems, with
their own implicit schemes or parts’.56 The dissociations and complexities of
layering three disparate systems animate and disrupt the grid. It is a brilliant
exercise with the theoretical richness of Life A User’s Manual – yet, perhaps,
like some of the Oulipian texts, the idea is less rewarding than the outcome.
The scale of the park and the distance between the follies produces an experi-
ence less compelling than the limited edition folio of drawings. After Parc de
la Villette, Tschumi abandoned these methods.
In the new millennium, Serial Art has attracted considerable historical revi-
sion, for example Anne Rorimer’s chapter, ‘Systems, Seriality, Sequence’, in
her New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (2001). In architecture, the
experiments of a previous generation in predetermined rule-bound techniques
are largely overlooked. Architects using rule-based procedures coupled with
software for ‘parametric’ design have suggested their work extends from the
serial music of Schoenberg and Boulez rather than architectural anteced-
ents. Sanford Kwinter, for example, describes Eisenman’s design process as
‘Boulez-like total serialism’ in its ‘rigid positions or relations’ and positions his
own work as more responsive.57
Kwinter’s assessment of Eisenman’s formalism comes just three years
after the publication of the AA Files issue on Perec. Perec, of course, never
held rigidly to the compositional relations and rules he set up – there are just
ninety-nine apartments described in Life when there should have been 100.
He sought the anomalous in the methodical, what Deleuze describes as the
clinamen – the Lucretian notion of the unpredictable swerve that atoms take
in space. This indeterminacy, according to Lucretius, provides the ‘free will
which living things throughout the world have’.58 For the Oulipo, the clina-
men could only be employed if it was not required, that is if the constraints
could actually be fulfilled.59 I would argue that Eisenman and Tschumi were
equally invested in the interruption, the error and the impossibility of perfect
systematisation. Indeed, they had little choice if they were to persist in archi-
tectural practice and not, like Netsch, resort to designing games.

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Yet, while Eisenman’s and Tschumi’s experiments with predetermined

rules were fruitful, during the period that followed Perec’s introduction to
a new audience, architects were increasingly moving away from any position
that asserted the autonomy of the discipline. Autonomy, as Alejandro Zaera-
Polo notes, enables the development of disciplinary codes in the absence of
external attachments but ‘limits the transformative potential of the disci-
pline’.60 It is this transformative potential that architects have sought in the
past two decades. An initial period of formalist parametric experimentation in
the digital has given way to the adoption of parameters directed at material and
environmental performance. The formalist conviction that messing with the
conventions of representation of language and text, image or object is in itself
disruptive of the political status quo holds little sway. Walker’s plea for the
potentialities of Perec’s method will not find adopters until it is recombined –
as it was for Perec – with social critique and new technologies.

CONCLUSION
I would like to conclude with a lesson from the visual arts. The descriptive
mode of recording the city that Perec purported to carry out anticipates the
impassive but systematic eye of Google Street View: the car-mounted camera
recording nine images every ten metres. Street View offers an archive of frozen
images of ordinary streets and the life that takes place in them for artists such
as Doug Rickard. Rickard’s New American Picture (2012) crosses Oulipian
methodology with photographic social documentary.61 Rickard’s initial search
criteria was ‘Martin Luther King’, yielding all those streets, boulevards and
parks named after the black activist, almost all of which were in poor black
neighbourhoods. From Google Street View, Rickard extracted around 10,000
images. Selected images were rephotographed, cropped and Google’s pro-
prietary markers removed in Photoshop. Of these images, seventy-nine were
chosen for an Aperture monograph, and twenty archival pigment prints were
exhibited at the Yosse Milo Gallery, New York City.
The aspect of change that preoccupied Perec in the Lieux project is here
embedded in the ways in which even the photographs in this project are now
outdated by Google Street View’s upgraded camera technology. Furthermore,
Rickard’s works have unwieldy titles that register the geographical coordi-
nates, the date of the Google photograph and the date of his reproduction of
it, for example #32.700542, Dallas, TX. 2009 (2010). Rickard’s project seems
to me to update Perec’s Lieux in a way that is immediately accessible and
resonant with a new generation of architects and artists. To see the two side
by side is to comprehend how the imposition of parameters and rules might
be combined with extraordinary reservoirs of available data about the city and

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186  s a nd r a kaj i- o ’grady

its flows of people, goods and money. More than ever, Perec’s combination of
the algebraic with the phenomenal and the geometric with the social offers rich
ways for the re-presenting and re-making of the built world.

NOTES
1. Peter Sloterdijk (1997), ‘The Crystal Palace’, Public 37, York Digital Journals, pp. 11–16;
Frederic Jameson (1991), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 38–45.
2. Architecture of Deconstruction: The Specter of Jacques Derrida (2012), Faculty of
Architecture at the University of Belgrade on 25–27 October, available at: http://labont.
it/aod-architectur-of-deconstruction-the-specter-of-jacques-derrida.
3. Bernard Cache (1995), Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
4. Greg Lynn (ed.) (1993), ‘Folding in Architecture’, Architectural Design, vol. 63, no. 3/4.
5. Douglas Spencer (2011), ‘Architectural Deleuzism’, Radical Philosophy, vol. 168, July/
August, available at: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/architectural-deleuzism.
6. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (eds) (2005), Deleuze and Space, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press; Simone Brott (2011), Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and
Guattari at the Horizon of the Real, Farnham: Ashgate; Helene Frichot and Stephen Loo
(2013), Deleuze and Architecture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Graham
Livesey (2015), Deleuze and Guattari on Architecture, New York: Routledge.
7. Beyhan Bolak Hisarligil (2012), ‘Franz Kafka in the Design Studio: A Hermeneutic
Phenomenological Approach to Architectural Design Education’, International Journal of
Art and Education, vol. 31, no. 3, p. 257.
8. Dani Cavallaro (2010), The Mind of Italo Calvino: A Critical Exploration of His Thought
and Writings, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, p. 4.
9. Letizia Modena (2011), Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination
in an Age of Urban Crisis, New York: Routledge, pp. 80–1.
10. Italo Calvino (1988), Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, p. 121.
11. Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, p. 123.
12. William Weaver, Damien Pettigrew and Italo Calvino (1992), ‘Interview: The Art of
Fiction No. 130’, Paris Review, no. 124, Fall, available at: http://www.theparisreview.
org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino.
13. Creative works in homage to Perec were a feature of the conference Species of Spaces:
Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Georges Perec, Teesside University, 28 March
2014, available at: http://www.tees.ac.uk/sections/news/pressreleases_story.cfm?story_
id=4450&this_issue_title=September%202013&this_issue=244.
14. Paul Hirst (1993), ‘Foucault and Architecture’, AA Files, vol. 26, p. 52.
15. Jacques Derrida (1986), ‘Point de Folie – Maintenant l’architecture’, AA Files, vol. 12, pp.
66–75.
16. Enrique Walker (2012), ‘The Scaffolding (Georges Perec’s Lieux)’, PhD thesis, Open
University.
17. Mark Rappolt was the AA Files second editor. Its first, Mary Wall, edited issues 1–40.
Rappolt edited issues 41–9 and was succeeded by David Terrien, now his co-editor at Art
Review. Rappolt studied eighteenth-century public sculpture in France, which led him to

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an interest in town planning and from there to the Architectural Association. He is now
focused on art. ‘In Conversation with Mark Rappolt’ (2013), Debut Magazine, 5 June,
available at: http://www.debutcontemporary.com/in-conversation-with-mark-rappolt/.
18. Paul Virilio (2002), ‘A Walking Man’, trans. Clare Barrett, AA Files, no. 45/46, p. 136.
19. Jean-Charles Depaule and Pierre Getzler (2002), ‘A City in Words and Numbers’, trans.
Clare Barret, AA Files, no. 45/46, pp. 117, 124.
20. Georges Perec and Kate Mortley (1993), ‘The Doing of Fiction’, Review of Contemporary
Fiction, vol. 13, no. 1, p. 27.
21. Georges Perec (2002), ‘Comings and Goings in rue de l’Assomption’, trans. Andrew Leak,
AA Files, no. 45/46, p. 59.
22. Gilbert Adair (1993), ‘The Eleventh Day: Perec and the Infra-ordinary’, Review of
Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no.1, p. 105.
23. Depaule and Getzler, ‘A City in Words and Numbers’, p. 127.
24. Depaule and Getzler, ‘A City in Words and Numbers’, pp. 117, 124.
25. Perec, ‘Comings and Goings in rue de l’Assomption’, p. 58, p. 59.
26. Kate Morris (2008), ‘Perec’s Alternative Topography: Figuring Permanence and the
Ephemeral in Lieux’, Octopus, vol. 4, p. 34.
27. Morris, ‘Perec’s Alternative Topography’, p. 33.
28. Georges Perec (1997), ‘Species of Spaces (1974)’, in Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and
Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 91.
29. Perec, ‘Species of Spaces’, p. 45.
30. Perec, ‘Species of Spaces’, p. 48.
31. Perec, ‘Species of Spaces’, p. 56.
32. Francesca Hughes (2014), The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure, and the
Misadventures of Precision, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 163.
33. Anthony Vidler (2007), ‘Reading the City: The Urban Book from Mercier to Mitterand’,
PMLA, vol. 22, no. 1, Special Topic: Cities, p. 235.
34. Kate Morris (2008), ‘Perec’s Alternative Topography: Figuring Permanence and the
Ephemeral in Lieux’, Octopus, vol. 4.
35. Peta Mitchell (2004), ‘Constructing the Architext: Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual’,
Mosaic, vol. 37, no. 1, p. 2.
36. Mitchell, ‘Constructing the Architext’, p. 3.
37. Hughes, The Architecture of Error, p. 209.
38. Enrique Walker (2014), ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas’, Columbia Abstract, Columbia
University, available at: http://abstract20122013.gsapp.org/dictionary-of-received-ideas/.
39. Enrique Walker (2010), ‘Constraints’, in Architecture as a Craft: Architecture, Drawing,
Model and Position, M. Riedijk (ed.), Amsterdam: SUN Architecture Publishers, pp.
25–34.
40. Enrique Walker (2005), ‘Decisions’, Volume, no. 1/1, p. 68.
41. David Goodman (2005), ‘Systematic Genius: Walter Netsch and the Architecture of
Bureaucracy’, in Charles Waldheim, and Katrina Rüedi Ray (eds), Chicago Architecture:
Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 261–84.
42. Martin Felsen and Sarah Dunn (2005), ‘Walter Netsch: Field Theory’, in Charles
Waldheim and Katrina Rüedi Ray (eds), Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions,
Alternatives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 254.
43. Walter A. Netsch (1958), ‘Objectives in Design Problems’, Journal of Architectural
Education, vol. 13, no. 2, p. 46.
44. Walter A. Netsch (1980), ‘A New Museum by Walter Netsch of SOM Given Order by
His Field Theory’, Architectural Record, no. 167, p. 118.

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45. William G. Jones (1990), ‘Academic Library Planning: Rationality, Imagination, and Field
Theory in the Work of Walter Netsch – A Case Study’, Academic Library Planning:
College and Research Libraries, May, p. 217.
46. Jones, ‘Academic Library Planning’, p. 219.
47. Walter A. Netsch (1987), Patent US 4651993 A, Design Game and Modules for Use Therein,
24 March.
48. John Hejduk (1985), ‘Frame 7’, Mask of Medusa, New York: Rizzoli, p. 129.
49. Rudolf Wittkower (1962), Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, New York:
W. W. Norton.
50. Anthony Vidler (1992), The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 118.
51. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 118.
52. Michael Sorkin (1991), Exquisite Corpse: Writings on Buildings, London: Verso, p. 38.
53. Peter Eisenman (2005), ‘The Silence of Excess’, Holocaust Memorial Berlin: Eisenman
Architects, Baden: Lars Müller, p. 4.
54. Bernard Tschumi (1983), ‘Sequences’, Princeton Journal, no. 1, p. 20.
55. Bernard Tschumi (1984), ‘Madness and the Combative’, Precis, no. 5, p. 153.
56. Tschumi, ‘Madness and the Combative’, 153.
57. Sanford Kwinter (1996), ‘Can One Go Beyond Piranesi?’, in Cynthia Davidson (ed.),
Eleven Authors in Search of a Building: The Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the
University of Cincinnati, New York: Monacelli Press, p. 158.
58. Lucretius, ii, 251 (1994), trans. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson, The Epicurus Reader,
Indianapolis: Hackett, p. 66.
59. Harry Mathews (1998), ‘Clinamen’, in Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie (eds), Oulipo
Compendium, London: Atlas Press, p. 126.
60. Alejandro Zaera-Polo (2008), ‘The Politics of the Envelope: A Political Critique of
Materialism’, Volume, no. 17, p. 79.
61. Doug Rickard, Artist Website: Doug Rickard, available at: http://www.dougrickard.com/.

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