The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2022
Brighten the Corners' 'Make New Space' runs Kapoor's drawings across two book volumes
For Anish Kapoor's 1,200-page architectural monograph, Brighten the Corners split the book in two and let images cross the seam between volumes.
Brighten the Corners · Steidl
What it had to solve
Make New Space is the first publication to gather Anish Kapoor's architectural projects and ideas spanning 40 years: sketchbook pages, digital renders, studio models, plans and installed works. Brighten the Corners, Kapoor's book designers for over a decade, wanted the object itself to show the stages of the creative process rather than merely illustrate them.
How it works
Make New Space gathers Anish Kapoor's architectural projects and ideas for the first time in one publication, from early sketches through digital renders and studio models to plans and installed architecture built over 40 years.
Brighten the Corners designed the two-volume, 1,200-page set so its physical form mirrors those stages: each chapter is printed on a different paper stock, and images continue across the end of the first book onto the second, so the seam between volumes becomes the threshold where an idea turns into a building.
The result is a catalogue readers move through with their hands, not just their eyes, published by Steidl in 2022. D&AD's archive records the work under Book Design, where the concept of staging the creative process in the medium of the book itself is the documented idea.
Why it lands
- The seam between the two volumes stands in for the step from drawing to architecture, so the object makes the conceptual argument physically.
- Distinct paper stocks make each stage of the process legible by touch and weight, without captions.
- Images crossing from one book to the other force readers to handle both volumes, moving through the work the way an idea moves through stages.
- A 40-year, first-ever retrospective of a sculptor's architecture demanded a form as monumental and process-driven as the projects inside it.
What it did
The binding itself carries the argument: the reader experiences the leap from drawing to built space with their hands, page by page and volume by volume. The publication is archived in D&AD's awards archive under Book Design, where the physical staging of the creative process is the documented idea.
What you can take
For a book about process, make the book a process: paper, binding and where images break can carry the argument more directly than any explanatory text.
Since then
Published by Steidl in 2022, the two-volume Make New Space followed more than a decade of catalogues and websites Brighten the Corners had designed with Anish Kapoor. D&AD's awards archive files it under Book Design and records no sales or audience figures, so the case rests on the design mechanism: a book whose paper stocks, volumes and crossing images stage the creative process in the reader's hands.
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