The Architect of Wonder. Es Devlin
Picture the great gatherings of our age. A stadium filled to the sky, tens of thousands of people holding the same breath. An Olympic ceremony watched across the planet. A winter night in Trafalgar Square, where a fifth lion opens its jaws and roars poetry into the dark.
In each of these moments, someone decided what the light would do, where every eye would travel, and the precise second a crowd of strangers would feel the same thing at once. For three decades, that someone has very often been Es Devlin.
She was born in London in 1971, read English literature at Bristol, then turned to fine art and the theatre. What followed, more than 130 projects in thirty years, reads like a map of modern culture.
The stages of Kanye West, from 2005 onwards. Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour, its vast screen opening like an iris to let performers appear and vanish. Adele, U2, The Weeknd, Lady Gaga, the Rolling Stones, Stormzy. The closing ceremony of London 2012 and the opening ceremony of Rio 2016. A Super Bowl halftime show crowned with three Emmys. Carmen rising from the lake at Bregenz.
In the theatre came The Lehman Trilogy and a Tony Award, three Oliviers, and a CBE for services to design.
Then there are the works made for anyone who happens to pass by. A mirrored labyrinth in Peckham that drew crowds through its streets. A singing tree at the V&A. That fifth lion in Trafalgar Square. Come Home Again outside Tate Modern, a chamber of drawings of the creatures that share London with us. Forest of Us in Miami.
And in Dubai, at Expo 2020, a British pavilion that wrote poetry together with its visitors. With it, she became the first woman to design the UK Pavilion since world expositions began in 1851.
Behind all of it lives one idea of breathtaking simplicity. Devlin calls an audience a “temporary society”: strangers bound together for the length of a performance by nothing but shared attention.
Stadiums were built for competition. She builds them into places of communion. She has compared a stadium to a saucepan and her task to placing the lid, holding the heat until thousands of people reach their boiling point together.
Here is what gives you goosebumps. The largest images of our time begin at the size of a notebook page. A pencil line. A small model turned slowly beneath a desk lamp until it holds. A sentence underlined in one of the thousands of books she keeps close. Her scale is planetary, and her method is as intimate as a diary.
Books are her compass. Library of Light set a ring of illuminated shelves beneath the arches of a Milanese courtyard, and Library of Us raised its volumes into a staircase mirrored in water.
This autumn, for the first time in Europe, she has opened that diary to all of us. Other Worlds at the Design Museum begins inside a faithful replica of her South London studio. It moves to the 30-Year Desk, a ring of curved tables carrying around 5,000 objects from her archive, among them thirty slowly revolving models. Then come walls of sketchbooks and paintings, and a corridor of blazing red.
It ends in the Infinite Library: more than 2,000 books turning on kinetic shelves above a mirrored floor, so that they seem to rise forever. These are the books that made her mind. “So I’ve offered every trace that led me along the way,” she said, hoping young designers would see how a practice grows over thirty years.
She has shaped what millions of us have seen, felt and remembered, and now she hands us the map of how she did it. Stand in that library among the books that formed her, beside strangers who came for the same reason, and you will understand what she has been building all along: a society of wonder, open to anyone willing to look up.
Es Devlin: Other Worlds is at the Design Museum, London, until 4 April 2027.
Images courtesy of Es Devlin.