Architecture and mathematics in Georges Perec's novel Life A User's Manual

Georges Perec's (7 March 1936 - 3 March 1982) novel Life: A User's Manual (1978) has a distinct place among experimental literary works in the world. With this novel, Perec brought a series of mathematics-based puzzles to literature. The novel makes these experimental features felt at every point, from its overall structure to its smallest details. The two main mathematical puzzles of the novel are the subjects of this thesis. Which are the Knight's Tour, which comes from the idea of the chess knight touring the entire board; and the Greco-Latin Square, which consists of two Mutually Orthogonal Latin Squares. My thesis includes the historical development of both puzzles, their application to the novel, their usage outside of this novel, and the developments on the subjects from the time the novel was written to the present. In this thesis, I also studied George Perec's other experimental texts: I tried to perceive, comprehend and examine the language games, oulipian procedures and creative potential possibilities that can be observed in these texts. I explored, tested and questioned the ways and procedures of transferring these methods to architecture. With the methods I gathered, I attempted to either alter a design or produce new designs. I compared the resulting designs with each other using various methods. Based on the data I obtained from the puzzles, I disassembled the visual materials and rearranged them in new ways, or determined the characteristics of the visual that would be formed. I compared these images by mirroring or superimposing them, in terms of their features such as degree of similarity, axial or point symmetry, and order. Keywords: George Perec, Life A User's Manual, Oulipo, Experimental Architecture, Potential Architecture