WRITERS AT WORK.(Novel, exhibition of writers at work in specially-designed environments at the Flux Factory)

A room of one's own, in which to write: it's an old and chronically romanticized idea--the solitary space, with an ashtray, an Olivetti, the morning light just so. Each writer has his own preferences and fetishes, of course. For Proust, it was walls insulated with cork, to keep sound out. For Bellow, a tilted drafting table, so that he could write standing up. Cheever looked out a window facing the woods; Hawthorne turned his back on one. Joseph Heller worked atop a shag carpet. The ideal persists, in a wireless age. Amy Tan surrounds herself with furniture from Imperial China.

In Queens, recently, an artists' collective called Flux Factory commissioned architects to design three writers' "habitats"--human terrariums, essentially, into which writers would move for a month's time, as part of a "living installation" called "novel." Three subjects relocated to the boxlike spaces about a week ago, and on June 4th they are expected to emerge with finished books. The Flux designers did not seek advice from other working writers about what makes a productive or inspirational space. Their guiding principle seems to have been: Just think what Solzhenitsyn could have written had his prison cell been properly feng-shui'd.

The week before the writers moved in, Flux's president, Morgan Meis, gave a tour of the unfinished boxes. "This one is pretty much a hobbit hole," he said of the first box, which was constructed mostly from found materials, bounty from a month's worth of "dumpster diving" by its designer, Ian Montgomery. Meis sat down and made a serious face, impersonating a writer. "So you sit here and concentrate, and you look out," he said, gesturing toward a dirt trough, where fast-growing grasses were to be planted, "to mark the passage of time." He added, "The roof will grow, too. The space will be growing through the month, as you write."

Nearby, an architect named Paul Davis was tinkering with the space his firm, Salazar Davis, designed for the writer Laurie Stone, a wood box with translucent walls and a ramp through the middle. He had read some of Stone's work for inspiration. "A theme of her writing seems to be herself and her thought processes--how she evaluates herself in relation to external circumstances," he explained. "She said ...