Time travel: Interior architecture and the exhibition space

Author: Anne Massey Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 28 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/massey-2018-time-travel-interior-architecture-exhibition-space.md

Summary

Anne Massey — the historian of the Independent Group (page needed; see log) and co-editor, with Gregor Muir, of ICA 1946–68 — argues that interior architecture's writing is trapped in architecture's frozen-time conventions: the pristine, uninhabited, "shiny new entity" of the finished project photograph, and the linear "before and after" narrative that makes design a neat problem-solution machine ("its critically naïve offshoot, design thinking"). Against this she proposes acknowledging "a plurality of befores and afters" — the same interior read across years of use — which opens the subject to social, political, and cultural context "beyond styles, technical innovations, and authorial tropes." The case study is one interior followed for sixteen years: the first-floor former drawing room of 17–18 Dover Street, remodeled by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in 1950 as the Institute of Contemporary Arts' exhibition space and read here through its installation photographs — Paintings from Haiti (1951), Parallel of Life and Art (1953), and an Exhibit (1957) — plus the ICA's 1967 departure to The Mall and its 2014 archival return to Dover Street (facsimiles inserted into the Comme des Garçons store), where "a new temporality was born."

Key Claims

Interior architecture is "a relatively new discipline" situated between architecture and interior design; its writing "oscillates between the physical shell of the building and the look and feel of the spaces within buildings," and relies "heavily on the concepts and historiography of architecture combined with methods of design history and the emerging field of interiors."
The prestige deficit is structural: as Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal put it, "Historically the subject of interiors has been perceived as a marginal pursuit, mostly vocational in bias and lacking intellectual gravitas" (p. xvi). Some writing on interior architecture "gravitate[s] more toward an architectural approach" precisely because the new field of interiors "is perceived as lacking the prestige of architecture."
Architectural illustration convention as temporal control: the interior is habitually presented as "a freshly constructed, shiny new entity, usually without inhabitants in a fixed moment of time, everlasting and unchanging" — and Jeremy Till names the 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" (Architecture Depends, p. 79). See static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
The "before and after" linear narrative and the "new and improved" are "endemic in design theory"; design thinking is design's "critically naïve offshoot," resting on "a simplistic view of the design process" (via Lucy Kimbell, Design and Culture, 2011).
Central thesis: "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." Considering "the passing of time," interior architecture becomes "subject to a more critical reading of images and the interiors they represent beyond styles, technical innovations, and authorial tropes." See plurality-of-befores-and-afters, temporality.
The ICA was founded in 1946 by "surrealist sympathizers" (Peter Gregory, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, Peter Watson) on the model of MoMA — but the founders, realizing they personally owned most modern artwork in Britain, abandoned the permanent collection and created instead "a modern arts laboratory for exhibitions of art, design, film, literature, and photography," staging "discussions and concerts to foster an atmosphere of critical inquiry." It was the first institution in London to show Jackson Pollock, Leon Golub, and Andy Warhol, and "the intellectual home for the Independent Group during the 1950s and 1960s."
The exhibition interior itself: in early 1950 the ICA secured the first floor of a nineteenth-century West End townhouse; Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew remodeled it in 1950; the upstairs former drawing room (approx. 16 × 5.5 m) housed twelve exhibitions annually plus the public program — "an exceptionally difficult space to house London's avant-garde headquarters."
The chapter's challenge to exhibition studies: its focus on artworks, "the intertextuality of the exhibition as event," and networks of artists, curators, and visitors "does not take the spatial culture of the exhibition space sufficiently into account." Method: writing "largely informed by research in the ICA archives held at Tate Britain," with images "selected to evoke a certain atmosphere, allowing us to travel back in time." See time-travel, exhibitionary-complex.
Hamilton's August 1957 photograph of the an Exhibit installation read as a time-capsule: "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… 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." See ephemeral-interior, boundaries.
an Exhibit (August 13–24, 1957), by Lawrence Alloway, Richard Hamilton, and Victor Pasmore, was "A populable art work" — "a combination of a maze and a hall of mirrors," an environment the visitor navigates at will "passing around and between the temporary boundaries erected by Perspex panels." The gallery was "a semi-private and semi-public space. It was a members' space, but visitors could buy a one-day membership. There was a members' bar, but a program of public events"; the drawing room was "remodeled using the Theory of Games and behaviorism to challenge the ICA gallery visitor." See populable-art-work, play, privatised-public-space.
The an Exhibit catalogue was a foldout A0 sheet on translucent red-and-black paper echoing the Bauhaus legacy of Hamilton and Pasmore's "Basic Design" course at King's College, Durham University (Newcastle) — "the forerunner of the Foundation Course in Art & Design" — with a "self-conscious historicism in the text; the artists are writing for posterity and for the future archive."
Alloway, the exhibition's diarist: "A fuller degree of physical participation than is obtainable with separate works of art tempts the constructivist to dream of public monuments. an Exhibit is a way of accepting the limited conditions of an exhibition and overcoming them to make a drama of space that involved the spectator" (Architectural Design, August 1957, p. 789).
The Perspex panels used commercially standard dimensions (1.2 × 0.6 m, eight inches) in red, grey, black, and white, hung on nylon thread "in a loose grid formation of 16 inches," ordered differently for Newcastle and London — "reinstalled in an endless distribution of divisions and boundaries to create a myriad of mazes to challenge the exhibition visitor." See flexible-interior.
Paintings from Haiti (March 13–April 6, 1951): Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry designed hanging screens "on the unit system so that they can be used singly in twos or to form groups of alcoves" — double-sided, covered in blue fabric, with individual adjustable light fitments, "stand[ing] firmly on solid laminated legs."
Richard Hamilton (interviewed by Dorothy Morland, c. 1977) on the room's resistance: "the architectural features and style of the place really was not conducive to hanging pictures successfully… The screens that had been made were covered with blue felt… and the end walls were glossy straw which wouldn't take a picture… the big problem with the ICA was not only the décor but the fact that one wall was entirely taken up with window."
Parallel of Life and Art (September 11–October 18, 1953), installed by Alison and Peter Smithson, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Ronald Jenkins, who "called themselves editors of the photographic images": photographs of "diagrams, art works, missiles, insects, and vegetables" blown up on card, "propped up against the wall, hung from the ceiling with fishing wire, or pinned to the walls"; the Fry and Drew screens moved out so the images could be "experienced as a whole, as a total environment." See montage, event-space.
The space's later performance history: Yves Tinguely's "Cyco-Matic-Evening" (November 1957, two cyclists riding through paint onto a one-mile paper race); Mark Boyle's 1965 Brechtian audience-takeover (immortalized in Oh What a Lovely Whore!); Boyle's light show for the ICA's moving-out party in December 1967 with Soft Machine.
The ICA "had now outgrown Dover Street" ("bursting at the seams," Art & Artists, January 1968, p. 3); four years of premises-searching and two years of negotiation moved it to John Nash's The Mall — creating "a new phase," the older surrealist generation withdrawing and "a new generation of more obvious political activists taking the helm, led by the theater impresario Michael Kustow."
Institutional forgetting and return: "For many years, the ICA regarded itself as a brand new organization and rarely looked to its past." Under Gregor Muir, the archival turn — ICA 1946–68 (2014, with Massey) and a series of archival displays — "led to the ICA revisiting its original Dover Street premises, now occupied by high-end fashion brand Comme des Garcons, and installing facsimiles of its archival remnants there. Inserted between and above the haute couture clothing were 1950s private view cards and blown-up ICA bulletin covers… The ICA once again managed to insert itself into Dover Street, and a new temporality was born." See memory, adaptive-reuse.

Connections

Concepts: temporality · plurality-of-befores-and-afters · interior-architecture · ephemeral-interior · populable-art-work · event-space · exhibitionary-complex · white-cube · adaptive-reuse · flexible-interior · boundaries · play · montage · memory · drawing-room · architectural-photography · privatised-public-space · narrative-space · historiography-of-the-interior · pop-art

Authors: massey-anne (author) · marinic-gregory (Reader editor) · weinthal-lois and Graeme Brooker (quoted via the Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design) · Jeremy Till (quoted, Architecture Depends)

Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture (Position AB — the discipline's marginality and its frozen-time conventions) · static-vs-dynamic-architecture (Till's freezing of time as the static pole's representational regime) · truth-and-illusion (the archival photograph as time-travel illusion) · power-and-space (access by membership)

Related source notes: Hedges — The waiting room — both chapters read interiors through time, Hedges via the waiting drawing, Massey via the installation photograph; Hollis — (Re)constructing Histories — the discipline's founding historiography that Massey's plurality-of-befores-and-afters radicalizes into a single room's sixteen-year sequence; Stokes-Rees — Symbiotic spaces — two exhibition-space chapters: the MoM's narrative symbiosis vs. the ICA's anti-museum laboratory; Croft — Movement and Myth — two single-interior temporal case studies (Schröder House; ICA Dover Street) auditing modernism's spatial promises in use; Qureshi — Spatial therapies — the discipline's past-present-future operation, of which Massey's plurality of befores and afters is the historiographic ground; Taylor — Shape shifting — the Reader's other temporality chapter (real time vs. historical time); Weinthal — A pirouette on the orthographic hinge — two critiques of the frozen image (the drawing; the photograph); Meninato — Spatial seductions — installation practice as interior-architecture's artistic register.

Direct Quotes

"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." (Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends, p. 79, quoted)

"Historically the subject of interiors has been perceived as a marginal pursuit, mostly vocational in bias and lacking intellectual gravitas." (Graeme Brooker & Lois Weinthal, "General Introduction," p. xvi, quoted)

"This chapter argues that 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."

"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. A consideration of temporalities supports a more critically engaged reading of the interior by adding a new dimension."

"This chapter draws on – but also presents – a challenge to exhibition studies, which does not take the spatial culture of the exhibition space sufficiently into account."

"This is the past, a photograph, an image, a fleeting moment frozen in time, never to happen again."

"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 exhibition, an Exhibit, was conceived by Lawrence Alloway, Richard Hamilton, and Victor Pasmore as 'A populable art work.' It took place during August 13–24, 1957, and was planned to be a combination of a maze and a hall of mirrors."

"There is a self-conscious historicism in the text; the artists are writing for posterity and for the future archive. The visitors are invited to play a game, to explore boundaries between and across the disciplines of art and design, interior architecture, and exhibition installation."

"A fuller degree of physical participation than is obtainable with separate works of art tempts the constructivist to dream of public monuments. an Exhibit is a way of accepting the limited conditions of an exhibition and overcoming them to make a drama of space that involved the spectator." (Lawrence Alloway, Architectural Design, August 1957, p. 789, quoted)

"one of the problems of the ICA in the early days from the exhibition point of view was that the architectural features and style of the place really was not conducive to hanging pictures successfully … The screens that had been made were covered with blue felt … and the end walls were glossy straw which wouldn't take a picture." (Richard Hamilton, interviewed by Dorothy Morland, c. 1977, quoted)

"These exhibition organizers, or curators as they would be termed today, called themselves editors of the photographic images."

"The chosen images were designed to be experienced as a whole, as a total environment, and so the fewer impediments the better."

"The Institute of Contemporary Arts, in its cramped Dover Street pad for the last twenty-odd years, had begun bursting at the seams." (Art & Artists, January 1968, p. 3, quoted)

"The ICA once again managed to insert itself into Dover Street, and a new temporality was born."

Open Questions

The chapter claims a plurality of befores and afters will "enrich the discipline" — but can a longitudinal reading of one interior be generalized into interior-architecture method, or does it remain exhibition studies' supplement?
Massey's challenge to exhibition studies — "the spatial culture of the exhibition space" — asks what an exhibition history that begins from the room, not the works, would look like. Does the ICA's sixteen-year sequence supply a model (installation photographs as the archive of an interior's use) or only a case?
The 2014 return inserts "facsimiles of its archival remnants" into a fashion store: when a former exhibition interior becomes the display environment for its own facsimiles inside retail, what is the status of the copy — commemoration, adaptive reuse, or brand culture absorbing the avant-garde?
Hamilton's photograph is "a fleeting moment frozen in time" — yet Massey reads across many such frozen moments to recover time. Is the plurality-of-photographs method a solution to the freeze, or a montage of freezes (and would a moving-image archive change the argument)?
The ICA "rarely looked to its past" for decades — what institutional conditions make an organization forget its own premises, and what does the archival turn (Muir's history displays) recover and foreclose?