The Book in the Age of …
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The Book in the Age of … presents the outcomes of an intensive research seminar on the history and future of the book co-taught by Irma Boom, Phillip Denny, and Rem Koolhaas at Harvard GSD. In the course of the spring 2023 semester, the seminar assembled a collective history of the book and developed a dozen original conjectures for its future evolution.
The exhibition presented an enormous body of research assembled with a team of graduate students over the course of one semester. The research was ultimately compiled as a 1,369-page volume. To exhibit the seminar’s findings, we developed a set of strategies that translated the collective book research into four new formats: a super-scale atlas, a panoramic information wall, a bibliographic library, and a series of “shelfzibit” showcases—interventions in Loeb Library’s open stacks on the lower level. Each strategy defined a different mode for presenting and engaging the research; all of them had to distinguish the book as an exhibited object within the setting of the exhibition: a research library.
Atlas of the Book: We exaggerated the handheld scale of the research book into a twelve-foot-long and three-foot-tall tome that could convene multiple readers around its pages and set the stage for “social reading” in groups. The three-volume, folding Atlas of the Book was bound in waterjet-cut aluminum sheet covers and connected to the spines by bolted piano hinges.
The exhibition book’s three-part structure reflects the seminar’s sequence of research phases on the history of the book: pre-press, print, mechanization.
The Atlas was constructed with standard industrial hardware. A simple piano hinge was used to affix sheet metal covers to the book block, which were then bound and bolted with metal brackets. Pages were digitally printed on heavyweight cotton paper and bound as Japanese-folded sheets, ensuring the durability of the large pages: 18” x 36”.
While the research was initially organized into three chronological periods, the Atlas presents findings in thematic spreads that enable readers to make cross-historical comparisons.
