The Period Room: Tomorrow’s Version

Retired architect Norman Swann lives alone in his Victorian apartment, a family inheritance with a surface area of almost 600 square metres, where he collects objects and works of art, books, old magazines, and the blueprints and scale models of his unrealized visionary projects. In 2013, on the eve of his seventy-fifth birthday, the ailing and embittered Swann is on the brink of financial collapse. He must sell his London residence, located on the third floor of a heritage building on Cromwell Road: the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).

As believable as it appears, Swann’s apartment is neither real nor for sale. It is rather the in situ installation of Tomorrow, presented in the fall of 2013 by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, the artist duo whose multidisciplinary, and sometimes subversively humorous, work shakes up social norms and conventions. With Tomorrow, Elmgreen and Dragset transformed five rooms of the V&A’s former Textile Galleries, which had remained unused for several years, into a fully furnished domestic space. They thus invite visitors, who are simultaneously voyeurs, guests, and potential buyers, to explore the apartment, sit at the piano or read a magazine while waiting for the “owner,” who, as we might expect, is taking a shower.