Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini

Fantasy’s strong escapist quality sucks the reader into its imaginary world. The reader is transported into another world far from reality. This enables the person to experience a new world with different rules, and culture. Naturally, the architecture of the world is then altered from what is known to humans, to match the newly constructed reality. The fascination with fantasy was heightened with the book Codex Seraphinianus, illustrated and “written” by Luigi Serafini, an Italian illustrator and architect.

The book is an actual encyclopedia made up of different chapters dealing with fauna, flora, creatures, architecture, and etc. -the basic elements for the creation of a fantastic world. The fantasy lies in a totally imagined perspective on the world, which was represented graphically through hand drawings alongside an undecipherable language that Luigi Serafini had created. On the front page of the book, the Italian publisher Franco Maria Ricci, states, “I want the reader flipping through the “Codex Seraphinianus” to be like this warrior, or a child who has not yet learned to read, but rejoices in dreams or the fantasies the images suggest” (White, 2012). Serafini shares with his readers the story of an imaginary world of “hallucinogenic objet trouvés.”(Faucher, 2012). Thus, he manages to confuse the reader between the real, and the imagined, the lived, and the dreamt, between the physical experience and the mental one. The book of a purely fantastic nature, recreates the world by providing a wide array of illustrations that determine a new set of rules for its creation.

The fantastic world that the author created was based on a number of thoughts, experiences and memories he had which he then translated into his book. In fact, Serafini owes many of his illustrations to his childhood memories.

“It is the creation of a new world, built ad hoc, that shaped Serafini, the Serafini child that meanwhile studied diligently in college and spent his summers in the country home of a great-aunt, whose house was full of memories and souvenirs from exotic travels” (White, 2012).

By this the author, extracts elements of the quotidian that were locked in his memories, and mixes them with layers of fantasy to create this world.

“The childhood memories, for Serafini, unrolled like this, in a simple manner, with the naturalness of a great science fiction adventure, mixed with the “normal” childhood memories that, in their personal transformation, became history, myth, legend ”(White,2012).

A significant part of his illustrations contains objects used in everyday life that have been manipulated in a certain manner to provide a new thought of the object functionally, and aesthetically. For example, in the figure below, Serafini, uses playing cards as surfaces for a castle designed by the overlooking architect. The cards were thus, altered through their scale to fit the purpose of becoming walls.

The spaces found in the architecture chapter, capture the distant reality of the world.

The figure below shows a city confined within a triangular glass cage. The background of the city is a fake mountainous scenery. The space of the city is then repeated to form adjacent cities. Serafini,has taken the space of the city and transformed its architecture into one that redefines his image of it.

Following from this, it became clear that memories and thoughts of spaces and objects of daily life played a very important role in Serafini’s world. He was inspired to use them as base elements for his fantastic creations.

 The book is written and illustrated by Luigi Serafini, an Italian artist, architect and industrial designer who for two years (from 1976 to 1978) of his life did nothing but form this document. Serafini creates within his manuscript a fantastic depiction of a different world than this one; an imaginary world based on plants, animals, objects, people and their habits, and lastly architecture. He also, invented an undecipherable language laid out through out the book disregarding the few French sentences in a couple of his illustrations. The book gives the reader, through its drawings, the opportunity to fully escape reality, and dive into another world with different cultures and rules. It is the ability of an architect and designer to create an entire unreal world that had struck my primary interest. 

Species of Spaces and other Pieces by Georges Perec

The novel discusses the interior space of the domestic, and provides a different reading of it. Infused with layers of psychoanalysis of memories of spaces and objects, the author allows the reader to reassess the domestic. Reminiscences became progenitors of spaces.

According to Italo Calvino, the Italian writer of Invisible Cities, Georges Perec is one of the most significant literary personalities of the world (Perec and Sturrock, 1997). In his book entitled “Species of Spaces and Other Pieces” he unveils a different way of looking at interiors, architecture and the built environment. Perec starts with the description of the page within the book itself and then proceeds to the description of the bedroom: the bed, the apartment, the staircase, the apartment building, and gradually widens the circle of the story to finally reach the world.

“My memories are attached to the narrowness of that bed, to the narrowness of that room, to the lingering bitterness of the teas that was too strong and too cold. That summer, I drank ‘pink gins’ […] I flirted fruitlessly, […] I decided to become a writer, I slaved away at playing, on country harmoniums, the one tune I’ve ever succeeded in learning […] of a Bach prelude. The resurrected space of the bedroom is enough to bring back to life, to recall, to revive memories, the most fleeting and and anodyne along with the most essential.” (Perec and Sturrock, 1997)

The above quote demonstrates how the author represents, with the written word, the space of the bedroom. He gives the reader the appropriate spatiality of the bed by denoting its narrowness and adds to this a layer of memories where he describes his summer. This spatiality that is registered in the mind of the reader was due to Perec’s notable realism. According to Peta Mitchell whose research studies focus on twentieth-century fiction, Perec has fabricated an appealing archi-text which is “ a text in which architecture and literature are so thoroughly imbricated that book and building become one.” For example, the author elaborates on the many bedrooms he has been in, and their importance and meaning in his life. He depicts precisely and meticulously the bedroom of Rock (Cornwall) of summer 1954, when Perec was on holiday after just having passed his French Baccalaureate “When you open the door, the bed is almost immediately on the left. It’s a very narrow bed, and the room, too is very narrow, and not much longer than it is wide.” (Perec and Sturrock, 1997) Following this, the author introduced the term “infraordinary” to illustrate the ordinary and the different habitual aspects of everyday life. “What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary […] how are we to speak of these ‘common things’ […] ” (Perec and Sturrock, 1997). He elaborates on the significance of objects by reserving an entire page for the listing of things that were found next to his bed.

“With the exception of solid foodstuffs, everything I couldn’t do without was to be found assembled there in the areas of both the necessary and the pointless: a bottle of mineral water, a glass, a pair of nail scissors, a collection of crosswords by Robert Scipion, a packet of paper handkerchiefs, a hard brush that enabled me to give my cat’s fur a sheen that was the admiration of all, a telephone, thanks to which I was able not only to give my friends reports on my state of health, but to inform numerous callers that I was not the Michelin Company, a fully transistorized radio playing all day long, should the mood take me , various kinds of music interspersed with whispered news items about traffic jams, a few dozen books […]”(Perec and Sturrock, 1997). 

His account of the bedroom was also affected by a dream he had, where he met the British conductor and cellist, Sir John Barbirolli, who also led the Halle Orchestra in Manchester from 1943 till 1970.By this, Perec not only writes about the dimensionality of the space but also supplies the reader with the tools to imagine these dreams and memories of which he talks. To do so, he combines his views on the interior space with stories of everyday life that have shaped up his perspectives on the bedroom, the kitchen, the apartment and the rest of the world.Therefore, the importance of this book lies in Perec’s accurate depictions of how space is occupied, and the exhibiting of commonplace objects of our interiors as crucial elements that go unnoticed such as the doors, the walls, the heaters, the staircases. Adding the layers of memories and experience to these spaces, gives the space a new perspective. Although Georges Perec’s book is not of the fantasy genre, it nevertheless dealt with objects and spaces.  The fantasy, in my opinion, was depicted in the memories relating to the various rooms. As realistic as those descriptions were, Perec manages to recreate each room. For instance, the space of the bedroom for him became nothing but an agglomeration of objects. The image that springs to mind then, is that of a bedroom filled with a mountain of things stacked on top of each other. The space of sleeping then is redefined as a storage room of objects of the quotidian. That is what Perec saw as the most important thing of his bedroom. In his chapter about the apartment, the author introduces a completely different way of looking at the interior. Building from his memory about all the apartments he has been in, he deduces that each one has a limited number of rooms, and each room has a function. He claims “ apartments are built by architects who have very precise ideas of what an entrance-hall, a sitting room, a parents’ bedroom, a child’s room, a maid’s room, a box-room, a kitchen, and a bathroom ought to be like” (Perec, 1997). Based on this, he suggests another programmatic layout based on the senses.

“It takes a little more imagination no doubt to picture 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 seeery might look like, or a smellery or a feelery” .(Perec and Sturrock, 1997).

It is these moments in which the fantasy surfaces. Perec envisions a new home, one based only on the senses. He begs the reader to try to imagine how can this apartment look like, and how then would their perspective of the concept of a house change. Perec  investigates memories as a tool for the creation of the narrative. Hence, the source material of his  work was related to his remembrances of his past. The author extracts specific objects and spaces and manipulate them in their different manners. Through this, he demonstrates the essence of the space and object, and raises them from their status as trivial and mundane to that of great importance. Finally, by doing this, he  redefines the existent typologies of these elements by adding layers of fantasy onto them allowing for a different portrayal of space.