'A book is a sequence of spaces.'
This project explores the spatiality of book design by using the LCC Tower Block as both a site and a metaphor—treating the building itself as a book. It reflects on and imagines new ways of reading and engaging with the materiality of the book in the digital era.
The inspiration comes from Ulises Carrión’s The New Art of Making Books, in which he states that “the book is a space-time sequence.” Developed from my dissertation, ‘What is Offered to the Spatiality of Book Design by Viewing It Through an Architectural Perspective, and Why Is It Important?—with a Focus on Contemporary Art Books’, I created a user experience journey, consisting of 20 ‘book objects’, each labelled with page numbers (from page 1 to page 80) and excerpts from the first paragraph of The New Art of Making Books.
Audiences were invited to read this ‘book’/‘building’ by taking the lift in any sequence they wished, by photographing the objects to emphasise the movement of reading, and connecting and realising the relationship between body, reading and the space. In this large-scale installation, the building amplifies the distance between each “page,” and the moment the lift doors open it feels like randomly opening a spread of a book. Through this process of discovery, interaction, reading, and waiting (for the lift), audiences perceived both space and time as integral elements of the book—redefining what a “book” can be: its possible forms and ways of being read.
A publication documenting the project includes images of the installations and the ways audiences interacted with them. It consists of 14 layered sheets, each representing one floor—from the first to the fourteenth—recording the installation on each level. By folding each sheet twice and layering them together, an unbound structure is formed, allowing audiences to rearrange the sequence of floors and create unexpected, random layouts. This reflects the non-linear reading experience facilitated by the project. A building is now compressed back into a book.
Book a Table, 2025
Softcover, 56pp
297 x 215mm
