This project explores the spatiality of book design by using the LCC Tower Block as both site and 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 “A 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 an installation consisting of 20 book objects, each labelled with page numbers and excerpts from ‘The New Art of Making Books’, placed on each floor of the Tower Block building.
Audiences were invited to read this ‘book’/‘building’ by taking the lift in any sequence they wished, and by taking pictures of the objects to emphasis the movement of how they read. Through this process of discovering, interacting, reading, waiting (for the lift), and feeling the distance between the ‘pages’, participants perceived both space and time as integral elements of the book.
The publication documents the project, including the images of the installations and how the audience interact with them. It consists of 13 layered sheets, each representing one floor—from the first to the thirteenth—recording the installation on each floor. By folding each sheet twice and layering them together, an unbound structure is formed, allowing the audience to rearrange the sequence of floors and create unexpected, random layouts. This reflects the nonlinear reading experience facilitated by the project.