Giving your personal library away to others means a lot – I’ve had to offload books when relocating, and it’s heartbreaking to lose those special ties and intimacies held within their pages, that connection with characters and the author you feel speaks directly to you alone…
Es Devlin must be a voracious reader – she tells me about previous projects that have included selections from her own library as we walk towards her Library of the Four Winds, in the Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard in Yorkshire. These include Library of Light, 2025, in the courtyard at Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, and Library of Us, 2025, in Miami, which featured a monumental, triangular revolving bookshelf in a reflective pool on the beach holding over 4,000 texts that have influenced her life. All the books were subsequently donated to local Miami schools and libraries. Alongside Memory Palace at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery in 2019, Devlin filled Soane’s library there with all the books on architecture that informed her installation.
Paramount to Devlin’s ‘libraries’ is accessibility and encounter, a communal experience of shared reading and interaction, quite opposite to the idea of a library being a quiet, solitary environment. The books and bookcases are the medium with which she constructs these sculptures, the spoken word another.
Es Devlin, Library of the Four Winds, Castle Howard
“I’ve made a revolving library. It’s very personal to me. Responding to the situation, location and the people whose stories abound here, it’s a library of all my books that make me who I am. In the National Year of Reading, we really hope this is going to encourage people to come and meet each other through text.”
As you approach the temple, a short walk away from the main building at Castle Howard, there’s a circular path with four curved reading tables and benches girdling the pavilion. Books are placed at strategic intervals, each anchored with a large pebble. I see a familiar orange cover from my childhood on the table – Origami by Robert Harbin. Here is James Joyce’s Ulysses, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (both authors regularly banned in certain US schools and libraries), Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, amongst many other titles. Some have been annotated by Devlin.
“Each table is laid with a selection of my books, where visitors can sit and read while listening to my voice reading from them. The books are kind of reading themselves aloud.”
Es Devlin, Reading Tables, Castle Howard
Her voice is soporific; it’s like listening to an audiobook.
“I’ve really learnt to use my voice as an instrument since I’ve been using it in my work. I used not to like it – my voice is different from how I’m talking to you now. When I’m reading, I use it like I would play a clarinet.”
Inside the temple, an arched bookcase revolves on a mirrored base, the reflection forming an ellipse. The texts Devlin is heard reading from are also projected onto the bookcase; the books contained within have their spines reversed so you can’t see the titles.
“When I was at school, we read a poem by Keats that began ‘Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,..’ The teacher explained that the realms of gold are the gold-leaf edges of the book’s pages. And that, I guess, stayed with me. I really wanted to respond to Keats in this small room – the introduction of coloured spines didn’t feel appropriate, to compete with the gold leaf in the temple. It’s really a sculptural choice about colour and about what I wanted to be happening, with words projected on the books on a turning bookcase.”
The recorded readings last about an hour; every ten minutes or so between passages, birdsong is heard, and animated birds in flight replace the projected words.
Texts included in the readings range from David Abram’s Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, to Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde and Jorge Luis Borges, who in his The Library of Babel said: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” These are a mixture of literary and scholarly texts, much like the contents of the library of Ashurbanipal in 7th-century BCE Nineveh, purportedly the first library.
“The beautiful thing about this project is it’s been built by a company called Stage One, who are based close to Castle Howard. I’ve been working with them around the world – on Olympic ceremonies, on huge kinetic revolving pieces of architecture and performance. But to have the opportunity to make something together right on their doorstep, local to them, is also a profound pleasure.”
The Library of the Four Winds also celebrates the tricentenary of Sir John Vanbrugh’s death (1664-1726). Castle Howard was conceived in 1699 by Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor for Charles Howard and remains home to the Howard family.
The Temple of the Four Winds is based on the Villa Rotonda by Andrea Palladio, with four pedimented porticos on a podium. It was originally a place for refreshment and reading, and it makes me wonder what texts would have been read there then?
Vanburgh was a political activist, imprisoned in France for four years, but also a playwright, theatre manager, designer, architect, and more. Very much a polymath, as is Devlin and her practice in stage design, choreography, sculpture, and creating immersive spaces for civic engagement. Is she responding to the building or to him?
“So there’s so many parallels for me, the fascination he had with literature, with architecture, with geometry, with systems, to care about systems. Systems in power, systems in architecture.”
Es Devlin Library of the Four Winds at Castle Howard, Yorkshire, 13 June – 27 September 2026
Visit Here