Every floor of the house stands on the same structural grid of 5 × 5 squares (columns A–E: 3600, 3600, 3600, 3200, 2000 mm; rows 1–5: 2800, 2800, 3000, 4800, 1400 mm).
The order. A knight moves across the grid, visiting each square once (Warnsdorff’s rule, starting at A1). On each floor, from the ground up, the rooms are numbered in the order the knight first enters them: 37 chapters in all.
The lists. 5 lists of five items each are dealt over the grid by mutually orthogonal Latin squares of order 5, so any two items from two different lists meet in exactly one square. A room receives the items of the square where the knight entered it. The room’s coordinates count as a constraint too.
Fulfilment. A constraint is fulfilled when the item really appears in the room, echoing when it appears next door, semi-fulfilled when it appears elsewhere in the house, and not fulfilled otherwise. Hidden constraints (coordinates, objects, quoted documents, autobiographical signs) are shown in red.
Clinamen. On each floor, the last room the knight reaches breaks its quoted-document constraint on purpose. And one room in the attic has no door: its chapter is missing. Floor/house plan, traced back to early 2008. The original blueprint is supposedly lost.
The grid
Each square shows the knight’s move number, then the item number dealt from each list (source, time, object, quoted document, autobiographical sign).
| A | B | C | D | E |
|---|
| 1 | ♞11·1·1·1·1 | ♞221·2·3·4·5 | ♞111·3·5·2·4 | ♞161·4·2·5·3 | ♞71·5·4·3·2 |
|---|
| 2 | ♞122·2·2·2·2 | ♞172·3·4·5·1 | ♞82·4·1·3·5 | ♞212·5·3·1·4 | ♞102·1·5·4·3 |
|---|
| 3 | ♞253·3·3·3·3 | ♞23·4·5·1·2 | ♞233·5·2·4·1 | ♞63·1·4·2·5 | ♞153·2·1·5·4 |
|---|
| 4 | ♞184·4·4·4·4 | ♞134·5·1·2·3 | ♞44·1·3·5·2 | ♞94·2·5·3·1 | ♞204·3·2·1·5 |
|---|
| 5 | ♞35·5·5·5·5 | ♞245·1·2·3·4 | ♞195·2·4·1·3 | ♞145·3·1·4·2 | ♞55·4·3·2·1 |
|---|
Source
- the municipal governmental archive
- British declassified documents on China (National Archives)
- textual writings from artist research; novelistic writing
- maternal family photographs
- diary entries from my maternal grandfather
Time
- early 1990s: the land is bought
- late 1990s: the house is built
- the years of my birth
- 2008: the last renovation
- 2025: the floorplan is found again
Object
- The Surgical Clinics of North America, Vol. 69 No. 3, June 1989
- a Hasselblad 500C
- the red bin chutes of the building site
- the floor/house plan
- a slide projector
Quoted document
- Milan Kundera
- Louise Glück
- Nakahira Takuma, Degree Zero
- William Blake
- “Like a Spoon of Sugar” (my poem)
Autobiographical sign
- Suzhou
- London
- the Royal College of Art
- my paternal grandparents
- my grandfather