Es Devlin's Rotating Library Holds 2,000 Books at London's Design Museum

More than 2,000 books rotate on an eight-meter-wide triangular shelf inside London's Design Museum, forming the centerpiece of Es Devlin's new installation An Infinite Library. Some of the volumes still show signs of use — copies pulled from Devlin's own studio shelves, including James Gleick's Chaos, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. The books sit in a visual order imposed by color, arranging a collection built over years of reading.

The sculpture turns above a circular mirror that extends the shelves across the gallery floor. Projections move across the shelves while Devlin's recorded voice reads selected passages.

The installation occupies the final room of Es Devlin: Other Worlds, her first retrospective in Europe, opening October 2nd, 2026 and running through April 4th, 2027. The exhibition was curated by Johanna Agerman Ross, Danielle Thom and Margherita Dosi Delfini, in collaboration with Devlin and her studio.

A Studio Opens Onto a 30-Year Archive

The exhibition begins at the other end of the process. Visitors first enter a recreation of Devlin's South London studio, where books and maquettes line the shelves and drawings, tools and paint cover her desk. From there, the show traces the work that grew out of these materials — theater sets, museum installations and concert-stage constructions.

A series of concentric desks holds drawings, photographs and more than 30 models from Devlin's design process. The display includes work connected to The Lehman Trilogy, the London 2012 Olympics closing ceremony and Forest of Us in Miami. Along the gallery walls, sketches and collages reach back into her school years. Their scale is small, even when the projects they preceded filled an arena.

Older Works Find a New Setting

Come Home Again also returns to London, four years after its presentation outside Tate Modern. Its cut-out drawings of endangered species once illuminated a structure based on a section of St Paul's Cathedral dome. At the Design Museum, the work sits beneath a mirrored ceiling, changing how visitors see its dense collection of moths, birds and plants.

The library closes the exhibition with a different kind of archive: the books Devlin has kept close. It follows three earlier sculptural libraries she built in Milan, Miami and Yorkshire, and is the first of the series installed inside a museum.

After the show ends, Penguin Random House UK will donate books from the installation to local schools and charities.