Rooms > Days > Products > Body Parts > Actions > Materials.

 

Rooms > Days > Products > Body Parts > Actions > Materials.

A quick diagram I have made after reading The Apartment in George Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.

This diagram looks at the connections between spaces and rooms, the actions we do in rooms and the product that is the facilitator for the action.

It takes the viewer on the journey from type of room - highlighting in a similar manner to Perec that rooms are "malleable space"; a bedroom could be a bathroom if it contained a bath etc - defined by the function they facilitate. The diagram then goes on to duration - weekly, from monday through to sunday - which highlights the rooms everydayness, and onto the products the room contains which narrows down the possibility of what that room could be - a bathroom contains a bath.

The diagram then looks at the body parts in specific relation to my diary and what body parts are highlighted within the diary. Parts such as toes and ears are seldom, if ever, mentioned in my diary. The emphasis on facial parts relates to the mirror and constant need to check if I look OK. The actions we do within a space are defined by the room itself. Such actions as bathing, showering, drying, carrying, and rubbing can only be facilitated by the product we are presented with. The action is a consequence of our engagement with a particular product and so I have created a list from my diary of the actions I made within the bathroom in relation to all of the products contained within the room, as opposed to a particular action with a particular product. Finally I was looking at the materials within the bathroom - most of the surface materials tend to be reflective which is an interesting observation and begs the question, what would the bathroom be like if it wasn't reflective and if we could not see ourselves?

Perec (The Apartment, P. 28) writes, "It seems to me, in any case, that in the ideal dividing-up of today's apartments functionality functions in accordance with a procedure that is unequivocal, sequential and nythcthemeral." In other words, that today's apartments (the today of pre-1973 atleast) are sequential to time and that "each room has a particular function". I agree with these statements, we pay more attention to our bedrooms than our bathrooms because we spend more time sleeping than bathing - even though we are completely passive in one of these rooms.

Later Perec goes on to compare the bedroom to a broom closet because functionally the both facilitate the same functions for exhausted bodies and vacuum cleaners, "recuperation and maintenance", which I find rather interesting. Both could be used for the same function if duration was not a key factor in the design of such rooms.

In relation the the bathroom, in Perec's model of a daily fictional family (The Apartment, P. 28 - 30) requires that the bathroom is used throughout the day by at least 3 separate people on 6 occasions between 07.15am and 21.45pm - the duration of time spent in each place varies greatly however. 1hr 25mins in spent in the bathroom in comparison to 9 hours in the bathroom. If action within the room is taken into consideration, the bathroom becomes the more used space.