Plurality of Befores and Afters

Definition

The plurality of befores and afters is Anne Massey's methodological proposal for interior architecture: the discipline should read the interior "not just at a single before-and-after moment but also at a plurality of befores and afters." The concept names two targets and one program. The targets are the two frozen-time conventions Massey diagnoses in interior-architecture's writing: the architectural image of "a freshly constructed, shiny new entity, usually without inhabitants in a fixed moment of time, everlasting and unchanging," and the linear "before and after" narrative — "This notion of the 'new and improved' is endemic in design theory," with its "critically naïve offshoot, design thinking" solving "the problems of the world" on "a simplistic view of the design process" (via Lucy Kimbell). Jeremy Till names the deeper operation: "In freezing time, architects would have it that they can control time. It is a control that attempts to banish those elements of time that present a challenge to the immutable authority of architecture." The program: acknowledging the dimension of time "open[s] up" the subject "to new readings and interpretations introducing a broader understanding of social, political, and cultural contexts" — "Considering the passing of time, interior architecture is subject to a more critical reading of images and the interiors they represent beyond styles, technical innovations, and authorial tropes."

The concept's demonstration is structural: not one before-and-after but a sequence of befores and afters in the same room — the ICA's Dover Street gallery photographed at Paintings from Haiti (March 1951: Fry and Drew's blue-felt unit screens, bare floorboards, rationing-era overcoats), Parallel of Life and Art (September 1953: screens cleared, blown-up photographs propped and pinned, "a total environment"), an Exhibit (August 1957: Perspex hung on nylon thread, "a myriad of mazes"), the performance years (Tinguely 1957, Boyle 1965), the December 1967 move-out party — and then, in 2014, the archive's return: facsimile private-view cards and bulletin covers inserted "between and above the haute couture clothing" at the Dover Street Comme des Garçons, where "a new temporality was born." Each photograph is itself a frozen moment ("a fleeting moment frozen in time, never to happen again"); the plurality is what releases the room's history from the freeze.

Key Thinkers

• massey-anne — the concept's author: the plurality as interior architecture's enrichment; the sixteen-year ICA demonstration; the critique of design thinking's neat problem-solution model (2018).
• Jeremy Till — the diagnosis beneath the concept (quoted by Massey): architecture's freezing of time as an attempt at control; the immutable authority that banishes time's challenges (Architecture Depends, 2009).
• Edward Hollis — the historiographic ground the concept radicalizes: interior architecture as "(re)construction of preexisting structures," and histories that should be "discontinuous, multiple, layered" — Massey's plurality is Hollis's layered history compressed into one room's sequence (see historiography-of-the-interior).
• Lucy Kimbell — the design-theory critic cited against the "new and improved": "Rethinking Design Thinking" (Design and Culture, 2011) (not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• Temporality — the dimension the plurality admits: the interior's time acknowledged rather than frozen.
• Interior Architecture — the discipline the concept re-methods: writing that oscillates "between the physical shell… and the look and feel of the spaces within" gains its temporal register.
• Historiography of the Interior — the plurality as evidence-practice: installation photographs as the archive of an interior's use, read critically rather than transparently.
• Adaptive Reuse — the concept's built counterpart: every reuse is one more before-and-after; the plurality is what a single room's repeated retellings look like from the inside.
• Ephemeral Interior — the plurality's units: the temporary installation interiors whose sequence interrupts architecture's permanence.
• Time Travel (Method) — the reading technique the plurality names in the chapter's title: traveling back through the archive's installation photographs.
• Spatial Document — the plurality's negative case: Macken's preserved studio-museum, where "the passage of time is halted and change is excluded" — the single moment plurality refuses, made into an institution.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Time travel (Massey 2018) — the concept's source: "a consideration of the interior, which looks not just at a single before-and-after moment but also at a plurality of befores and afters, will enrich the discipline"; the two frozen-time conventions (the uninhabited shiny entity; the before-and-after narrative); Till's freezing-of-time diagnosis; the sixteen-year ICA sequence as demonstration; and the closing "new temporality" of the 2014 facsimile return.
• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the concept's negative case, read in contrast: the preserved studio-museum where "the passage of time is halted and change is excluded" and "these studio-museums suspend time and understanding of the temporality of place" — the single preserved moment as institution; Macken's own photographic comparison ("then and now" images that differ only by the artist's presence) shows the freeze the plurality must argue against.
• source-notes/odom-2018-productions-spatial-practices

Open Questions

• Does the plurality of befores and afters generalize beyond the exhibition interior — to the dwelling, the office, the reused shell — or does it depend on the exhibition's peculiar density of documented, photographed, restaged moments?
• Massey's unit of analysis is the photograph: a plurality of frozen moments read against one another. Is that a genuine plurality of temporalities, or a montage of stills (and would film, plans-of-use, or oral history produce a different plurality)?
• If the "before and after" narrative is endemic because the profession sells solutions, can the plurality be professional practice as well as critical historiography — or is it structurally a scholar's method that design briefs cannot afford?
• What is the relation between the plurality and spatial therapy? Qureshi designs the past-present-future connection into buildings; Massey reads it out of rooms. Is the plurality the therapy's missing evidence-base, or its critique (therapy still narrates forward)?
• Macken's preserved studio (2018) is the plurality's institutional antithesis — a room where "the passage of time is halted and change is excluded," whose 1980s and recent photographs differ only by the artist's presence ("it is merely Whiteley's presence in the photograph that reveals the time frame"). Does the plurality have an answer to the preserved interior — is its method precisely the reading that restores change to the frozen room (preservation itself as one more "before") — or does the studio-museum mark the plurality's limit, where the institution has already decided the interior's story?