Competing Projects 2025
BibliofielArmée de Verre Bookdesign
Belgium’s national poet Mustafa Kör ended his two-year term with the poem ‘Bibliophile’, a love letter to books, reading and libraries. An enormous (three by five!) panel was put up in his own community library in Leuven, showing the poem almost literally emerging from a haze of blurry text, symbolizing how books can help us gain focus in the chaos of modern life. The Leuven public library partnered up with Armée de Verre Bookdesign (based in Ghent, Belgium) to design an exceptional object: a gorgeous, oversized, 16 page bibliophilic edition (marbled endpapers) containing the poem in Belgium’s three national languages and English — moments of clarity in a sea of blurred text. The object comes with a removable cardboard wrapper which can be reassembled into a premium bookstand to display the book, giving Kör’s words the attention they deserve. The book was sent as a gift to all public libraries in Belgium.
