What's in a Space?
Select spreads shown.
6.5in by 8.5in
Perfect Binding
Typefaces: Baskerville and Seravek
FL 2022. Adobe Photoshop and InDesign.
Advisor: Rebecca Leffell Koren
This book explores how identical spaces can be personalized and transformed through individual possessions, habits, and styles. I used the page itself as a conceptual stand-in for physical space, demonstrating how a consistent structure can yield distinct experiences through variation in layout and material treatment. The book features three photo essays, each given a unique layout system while remaining within the same underlying page format.
The content is drawn from three chapters of George Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces: “The Bedroom,” “The Apartment,” and “The Apartment Building.” To subvert expectations around physical scale, I intentionally assigned space on the page counterintuitively—granting “The Bedroom” the largest presence, while compressing “The Apartment Building” into the smallest footprint. This constraint forces the latter to extend across more pages, emphasizing narrative density over physical scale.
Typographic treatments for marginalia and chapter headers reference architectural blueprints, with text separated, repositioned, and staged along the perimeter of the page. Excerpts are printed on thin gray paper to subtly evoke the material quality of blueprint stock, contrasting sharply with the glossy white paper used for the photo essays. This material contrast reinforces the idea that even uniform spaces can take on distinct identities.