Ephemeral Interior

Definition

The ephemeral interior is the temporary, uninstallable interior — the exhibition, installation, and event interior that exists for a duration and is then dismantled — read by Anne Massey as the force that "interrupts" architecture's permanence. Her set piece is Richard Hamilton's August 1957 photograph of an Exhibit at the ICA: "Here are Perspex sheets arranged in the nineteenth-century space, challenging the imperial past of traditional London with its wrought iron, Juliet balconies, and French windows. Here was a new future in translucent plastic, hanging playfully over the period details, mocking the heritage of the building, adding a new layer of understanding and provocation, erecting new boundaries between past and present, then and now – the here and now… Time is interrupted and the everlasting, secure order of neoclassical architecture challenged by this ephemeral installation – the exhibition. The boundaries between past, present, and future become blurred. We are on the edge between London as the imperial city and London as the site of modernity."

The concept's theoretical weight comes from its contrast-class: the architectural image of the interior as "a freshly constructed, shiny new entity, usually without inhabitants in a fixed moment of time, everlasting and unchanging" — the convention Massey critiques and Till diagnoses as architecture's control of time ("In freezing time, architects would have it that they can control time"). Against the frozen-permanent image, the ephemeral interior is defined by turnover: the ICA's Dover Street gallery held "a rolling series of exhibitions and events," twelve annually, each an interior stripped and rebuilt around the same French windows and straw-textured end walls. The concept also has a commemorative afterlife: the ephemeral returns as facsimile — the 2014 insertion of "1950s private view cards and blown-up ICA bulletin covers" between the haute couture of the room's current occupant, where "a new temporality was born."

Key Thinkers

• massey-anne — the concept's theorist: the ephemeral installation as time's interruption of neoclassical permanence; the ephemeral's archival afterlife in facsimile (2018; and her earlier "Ephemeral," 2010, the essay where the frozen-image convention was first named).
• Richard Hamilton — the concept's practitioner-witness: the installation photographs that freeze the ephemeral (1957) and the testimony that the historic room "really was not conducive to hanging pictures successfully" — the ephemeral interior built against its host's features (via Massey).
• Jeremy Till — the permanent pole's diagnostician: architecture's freezing of time as authority-management, the convention the ephemeral interior breaks (quoted by Massey).

Related Concepts

• Plurality of Befores and Afters — the concept's method: ephemeral interiors are the units whose sequence replaces the single before-and-after.
• Temporality — the dimension the ephemeral admits: "Time is interrupted."
• Event Space — the concept's class: the interior of exception ("not a place of quotidian habitation"), of which the exhibition gallery is the modern instance.
• Adaptive Reuse — the concept's host-relation: every ephemeral interior is a temporary reprogramming of an existing shell — the ICA's townhouse remodel as its ur-case.
• Montage — the ephemeral's assembly logic: Parallel of Life and Art's propped, wired, and pinned blown-up photographs — the interior as a temporary collage dismantled after the run.
• Populable Art Work — the ephemeral's most theorized instance: an Exhibit's rehangable Perspex maze.
• Obsolescence — the inverted economy: where McClure & McClure prize persistence, the ephemeral interior plans its own obsolescence as a value.
• Production-Oriented Practices — the ephemeral's practice-theory: Odom's POPs make the ephemeral the primary product rather than the interruption — installations as "diagrams for productions of ephemerality and experience," "the most accessible territories for emerging methodologies to be tested."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Time travel (Massey 2018) — the concept's source: "this ephemeral installation – the exhibition" interrupting "the everlasting, secure order of neoclassical architecture"; the twelve-exhibitions-annually turnover; Hamilton's hostile-host testimony; Tinguely's "Cyco-Matic-Evening," Boyle's Brechtian takeover and light show; and the facsimile return ("a new temporality was born").
• Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects (Odom 2018) — the concept's practice-theoretic complement: the ephemeral inverted from interruption to primary product. POPs generate "interiorities that are not discrete, temporally frozen responses, but multivalent systems, ongoing spatial effects, and atmospheric productions"; Blur Building and Cloud Gate are "diagrams for productions of ephemerality and experience"; and the caution against the concept's romanticized reading — "Words such as 'ephemeral' or 'phantasmagoric' are often used to describe the transitory or elusive effects manifested by these contemporary production-oriented practices… Too often, attention is focused on the ephemeral as having no material implications." Where Massey's ephemeral interrupts a host's permanence, Odom's is systematized as output — and given material implications (form "articulated through material, color, and finish"). See installation, productions.
• Event-space: A performance model for spatial design (Hannah 2018) — the concept's axial definition and its pole: the ephemeral as one end of the interior's trajectory — "between architecture's claim to enduring structures and the dynamic flux of theatrical performance… between the seemingly eternal and the ephemeral" — and its theoretical rehabilitation: the "fleeting, vestigial, and ephemeral" as weak architecture's constructional medium ("a new type of monumentality 'bound up with the lingering resonance of poetry after it has been heard'"), admitting "the aleatory and temporal, found in the theatrical event" — ephemerality not as the interior's lack (against permanence) but as its resistant power ("defying attack through transience, permeability, and anti-monumentality"). See event-space, weak-architecture.

Open Questions

• The ephemeral interior is known almost exclusively through photographs — "a fleeting moment frozen in time, never to happen again." Does the image archive preserve the ephemeral or replace it (the facsimile as the ephemeral's only survival)?
• Is the ephemeral interior always an interruption of a host (Perspex over wrought iron), or can it be an interior from birth — and what distinguishes the ephemeral interior from the event space it so often inhabits?
• Massey's ephemeral interrupts imperial London: are the politics of the ephemeral always a politics of the host's authority (heritage, empire, the neoclassical order), or can the temporary interior also serve power (the retail pop-up, the branded environment)?
• Odom's caution — "Too often, attention is focused on the ephemeral as having no material implications" — reframes the concept's evidence problem: the ephemeral is known through photographs because it leaves matter behind (screens, scaffolds, caustic-light surfaces). Is the ephemeral interior's ephemerality in its duration or only in its conception — and does the POP redeployment ("tested, evaluated, deployed, sampled, and redeployed") make the ephemeral interior a durable method wearing a temporary product?
• The 2014 facsimile return makes the ephemeral durable by copying it. Is commemoration the ephemeral interior's recuperation — its absorption back into the permanent order it once interrupted?