The Unfurled City is a book installation that discusses the different ways in which cities and their inhabitants influence one another. The project consists of three accordion-bound books that unfold to create a kind of pseudo–city grid across the floor. In installation form, the books prompt readers to physically move, navigating the content nonlinearly based on personal intrigue, intentional visual segues, and challenging topography.

As opposed to relying on a prescriptive reading order, I felt it was important that the reader was active in discovering the content themselves. The goal was to create an interactive experience that mimicked the infinite unique, personal ways that people traverse real urban spaces. And while the installation form allows for immersion into the project’s content and theme, the transformation into the book form allows for unobstructed interfacing with the complexities of the text and the books’ small surprises.

Content

The Unfurled City contains four texts: one primary text for each book and one supplementary text dispersed across the set of three. Each book also adopts a viewing angle—imagined as a person standing in a city looking up, down, or forward—which relates to the thesis of its respective text.

The largest book contains Saskia Sassen’s Does the City Have Speech? Lofty and philosophical in tone, Sassen discusses the city as a superorganism that imposes a collective will onto its inhabitants, shaping behavior, and therefore culture; she also discusses forces such as gentrification and surveillance that threaten to destroy the city’s speech. This sweeping, abstract discussion of the collective dictated that this book would adopt the angle of looking up. This meant taking visual inspiration from skyscrapers, playing with verticality, glassiness, and huge display type.

The next book contains a transcript of Abigail Thorn’s Why We Can’t Build Better Cities. Far more tangible than Speech, Better Cities deals in community-driven anecdotes and peer-reviewed statistics. It discusses how cities foster unique behaviors—and therefore cultures—which are threatened by gentrification. This concrete discussion of specific communities dictated that this book would adopt the angle of looking down. The book is grittier in texture, more horizontal, and uses type distortion to express the ongoing tensions these communities face.

The smallest book contains Colson Whitehead’s City Limits, a short piece of prose that explores inhabitants’ private cities—the individual ones that exist solely in the mind, built of memories, routes, and routines. The focus on the individual rather than the collective dictated that this book would adopt the angle of looking forward. More than the others, it stresses the personal, visual point of view, using an unrelenting typographic collage to reference the barrage of signs, posters, advertisements, banners, and more that one would encounter when walking down an actual city street.

Lastly, excerpts of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities are interspersed throughout all three books. Calvino muses about dreamed cities made by man which reflect their creators. These vignettes help to balance the academic tone of the first two texts as well as reward closer looking with moments of whimsy and delight.

Format

The “city-ness” of the installation was imperative to the success of the project. Though many other formats and assemblies were considered, including motion pieces, way finding systems, and in situ sculptures, this "explosion" of the book form was ultimately the most elegant convergence of content and interaction. The format is made possible by the unique assembly of the accordion, which utilizes diagonally-folded corner spreads to create right angles when unfolded. This allows the books to wind across the room and overlap while maintaining a consistent orientation in the book form.

To facilitate a multitude of paths throughout the installation, I created what I call visual hotspots. The hotspots leverage the format’s capacity to collapse distance, bringing sections from the books with thematic or anecdotal parallels physically next to one another. All the texts were meticulously arranged to bring thematically resonant moments together, and these adjacencies are then color-coded, providing a visual bridge from one book to the other. You can see yellow, blue, purple, red, and green hotspots below. These cross-text connections, while not explicit, further promote an individual-led navigation through The Unfurled City.

Special types of hotspots occur where books overlap. These peaks highlight specific points of tension in their respective texts and behave with their own subsystem. The implication of gravity sees text physically breaking over the point of tension, highlighted in red at the peak’s apex. This subsystem is confrontational—purposefully unavoidable by any path. It uses the topography of the "skyscraper" to invert the superficial characterization of a city as a skyline, raising instead the real people who inhabit those cities and the conflicts innate to their survival.

A driving consideration for my decision-making throughout the development of The Unfurled City was viewing distance. What can the reader read in the installation vs the book form? What should they feel compelled to read? Each book has five to six typographic levels that address this. In the installation form, the viewer is expected to be standing or crouching, making the smaller running text inaccessible. And so, the largest text of each book provides brief summaries of the content in their respective locations, helping to guide the reader to areas of interest. Two subordinate levels provide more and more detail, easing into the minutia of the texts. However, since this format is not meant to be exacting, the running text is intentionally too small to comfortably read. This allows the reader to engage with the big ideas of the text without getting stuck in place.

The book form, on the other hand, provides access to the running text, with the top-level text visually breaking and losing emphasis. It also brings Calvino’s Invisible Cities into focus. In this format, the reader can comprehensively engage with the nuances of the content and are rewarded with the splendors of Calvino’s vignettes. These different formats speak to the ways people move through cities—through both broad, wandering exploration and deep, local investment.

The diagonally-folded corner spreads presented a unique design opportunity. Each corner is viewed in three ways: unfolded, recto, and verso (seen below). This allowed selected text, images, shapes, and counters to transform, occupying different visual or semantic roles in each state. Earlier drafts included many of these pedantic overlap details, but as I developed the project further, placing more emphasis on the installation form, I opted for the larger, more abstract, and gestural transformations you see here. The result is that the top level text, which guides the reader in the installation form, becomes image in the book form, thus naturally shifting which text is emphasized in accordance with the appropriate format.

When unfolded, the corners include an extra square of space that is not visible in book form. The images that occupy these spaces relate to a recurring theme of invisibility within the texts. Here, the installation form quite literally reveals an unseen community, threat, or poeticism.

Lastly, I felt it was important that the book form maintained some of the physicality and challenge of the installation. For this reason, I decided to cast the covers out of concrete. This gave the books palpable volume and heft, required a little more physicality from the reader, and spoke to the materiality of urban spaces.

Development

I originally became interested in the poetics of urban space after a trip to Amsterdam. There, I found myself rapt by the city—its pedestrian-centric infrastructure, seamless public transit, and vibrant neighborhoods. As opposed to my suburban upbringing, where it was a fifteen minute pothole-ridden drive to the grocery store, Amsterdam felt methodical. It was joyful just to move through a city that felt designed to be moved through. I began to research how built environments affect people in different ways (thus finding the texts which would comprise The Unfurled City). This research steered me to a foundational concept for the project—subjectivities. Reductively, subjectivities are circumstances (including environments, tools, interfaces, and identities) that spur specific behaviors, perceptions, and values in the people they affect. So the spaces in which we live shape our perception of the world. The texts discuss this concept in more detail, but it’s only important to know insofar as it framed this project as such: I would create an environment that prompted a specific suite of behaviors, a microcosm of the texts’ themes.

Finding a concrete footing for this abstraction, though, was not easy. As alluded to earlier, I spent many weeks researching format opportunities: immersive experiences, urban installations, way finding systems, exhibitions, motion pieces, and more. I finally landed on “exploding the book” because it would allow me to meet my longstanding love of bookmaking with the explorations in fabrication and sculpture that I was interested in at the time. It also facilitated the inclusion of longer texts, which could explain the complex, abstract, and sometimes tragic subject matter without reduction. Still, I wanted to push the book form as far as the content could support.

After the format and content were selected, drafting began. All three (originally four) primary texts were meticulously arranged in an enormous and convoluted InDesign mockup document. Related arguments, anecdotes, and imagery across texts were annotated and color-coded, then the texts were folded, unfolded, and refolded together until a bookmap began to emerge, generating the winding grid and overlapping pages you see in the final installation.

Though there were many, many challenges throughout this project, the most pivotal was this: is The Unfurled City first a book and second an installation, or first an installation and second a book? In the beginning, I approached it as the former. I designed each book in spreads and linked them to a mockup document, but the result was scattered, incoherent, and unnavigable. You can see an early draft of this mockup in the first image below. So midway through, I changed course. Essentially scrapping all my previous iterations, I started designing from a birds-eye view (the first draft of my Illustrator document can be seen in the second image). This meant that, for the installation to work, I had to sacrifice some of the book-ness of the books, forgoing many of the small details and pacing choices I had embedded in the earlier drafts. Ultimately, this approach succeeded, achieving my goals for reader interaction. You can see the final mockup and installed project in the final two images below.

The Unfurled City was the hardest, most complex project I’ve ever taken on, and I am extremely proud of what I accomplished. I enjoy the challenge 3D work and want to continue to pursue multimedia projects. There are opportunities everywhere to be a little weirder, to find new ways for people to interact with content, and to break from strict boundaries of format. Our physical spaces are rife for reinterpretation, both analog and digital, and that is what I most want to play with in the future.

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