Gentrifying Berlin, on the desk

In December 2018 I spent a week walking Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Schöneberg with a camera. The result was Gentrifying Berlin, a photobook I made for my degree at Nottingham Trent: over 40 black and white photographs about the fight against gentrification in those neighbourhoods. It was shown at D&AD New Blood in 2019.

Since then it has mostly lived on a shelf. Now it lies on the desk in the room, under this handbook.

How to look at it

• Click it. It comes up to face you, still closed, so you see the cover first.
• Open it. Click the cover or press →.
• Turn the pages. Click the right page or press → to go forward, the left page or ← to go back.
• Put it back. Press Esc or click off the book.

Every page is the original print file, trimmed to the page, so you see the book as it was printed.

Making a book feel like a book

I built it the way I build everything now: designed first, then built with AI-assisted coding. The book is made in code, not modelled: two boards, a spine, and a sheet for every leaf that bends as it turns.

Most of the work was in the small things a real book does without thinking. The pages bend down into the spine so the two sides meet in the middle. A page curls as you turn it. And a white hairline at the gutter turned out to be a pale page underneath showing through.

The introduction is as I wrote it at university, and I've left it that way.