How to Not Finish a Space: Report from Timelab, common room, 2024

For How Not to Finish a Space, common room was invited to conceive a publication for an installation they had made at Timelab in Ghent, BelgiumThe book examines open-ended architecture where unfinished interiors promote community ownership, adaptability, and shared control

After the landscape-format book was smythe-sewn, it was folded in half again.The resulting crease down the middle of the book acts as a physical division, creating two columns of information throughout the bookThe book is typeset in Helvetica BQ and Times Ten Bold in all lower case and with no indents for paragraph indication

The book was printed and bound at Printon in TallinnInitial book binding prototypes had inconsistent results, as some papers folded flatter than othersAfter multiple tests with different papers, paper weights and folding techniques, we landed on scoring the back cover which led to the flattest folding dummy

For the book, Bertrand Cavalier, a photographer who common room had worked with on Public School for Architecture Brussels and various projects since was commissioned to photograph different archetypical building elements for the bookUsing his phone, Cavalier photographed various elements throughout Brussels and Paris