British stage designer Es Devlin has long been a go-to collaborator for artists like Beyoncé and U2 — and during a Milan Design Week when theatricality was one of the industry’s main fascinations, her Library of Light installation proved to be just as big a draw as a stadium tour. Commissioned by Salone del Mobile, the set-up introduced a circular 18-metre-wide bookshelf into the Cortile d’Onore courtyard, which links three major cultural institutions: the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Braidense National Library, and the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.

Photos by Brian Wong

As the glowing shelves rotated, carousel-like, around an 1811 bronze of Napoleon Bonaparte, they showcased some 3,200 books from Milan publishing house Feltrinelli. Select texts were also represented in quoted excerpts that flashed across a stock ticker–like screen, as well as in evening readings that included clips of Benedict Cumberbatch reciting passages from Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time.

While Milan Design Week generally seemed hesitant to engage with the dark undercurrents that define our increasingly polarized society, Devlin proved to be one of the few people who understood how to read the room. “A library is an opportunity to see what the world looks like from points of view that are not your own, and I think that is urgent right now,” she said during a tour of the installation. “As we are funnelled ever more repetitions of our own existing points of view, I think libraries — and the multiplicity of ideas that they offer — are becoming an emergency service.” While quieter than many of the concerts that Devlin has staged in the past, Library of Light still spoke volumes.