Loveld 1985–2020
Precast concrete is made somewhere else and only assembled on site. A Loveld facade is therefore always a set of parts that arrived finished, and the company leaves the joints where they are. That is unusual on both counts: architecture and bookbinding alike treat construction as something to be covered. This book refuses in the same way, which makes it a study of the tension between material and representation. An anniversary book is self-presentation by definition, and the material it describes cannot be presented at all without showing how it was made.
Loveld has been making those facades since 1985. For their thirty-fifth year they came to my studio in Ghent, Studio Studio, and left the form to me. I went into the archive and chose what went in, which in a project like this is the real editorial question: loose material becomes a history only once someone selects.
The book falls into four parts, and that order is an argument. It opens with the most striking projects and their details, in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the result first, the way a facade also presents itself as a result. The middle turns to the company and its thirty-five years. Then comes the technical half, where the panel is taken apart and the company shows its own inside: how a panel is made, and what it looks like in there. A closing section deals with sustainability and what is still ahead. The reader moves from the finished building to the inside of the firm that makes it, and from there to what does not exist yet.
Swiss binding leaves the spine open, the stitching visible and the sections in plain sight. Each section carries its own colour: green for sustainability, orange for the anniversary, which is Loveld's own colour. The table of contents moves off the page and onto the object. The order can be read from outside before the book is opened, and the classification is material before it is typographic. Years run through the pages as small markers, so the chronology stays visible where the text is about something else.
The 215 by 275 mm block sits on a 240 by 320 mm cover, 25 mm wider and 45 mm taller than the pages it holds, so the block rests visibly on the board. Brillianta 4253 mounted on bookbinder's board, endpapers black. Inside, 304 pages of uncoated Munken Polar Rough, 150 gsm, set in Graphik with a serif for the running text. The book appeared in 2021.