The Book to Begin relates to the period 2008–2012 and contains notebooks, dummies and prototypes of the artists’ earliest attempts at editing the Ponte photographs and associated printed-matter debris into a book.

The Book That Never Was, the second book tower, contains the attempts towards a book that Waterhouse and Subotzky conceived of between 2012–2013 that was too unwieldy, ambitious, and complicated to ever publish. However, in being unrealisable, it did lay the foundation for the book that would be published, Ponte City (2014), the subject of the third tower. 

The tower for The Book that Became a Box holds the story of making Ponte City (2014). Considered by the publisher to be a workable version of the artists’ ambitions, Ponte City (2014) is a box containing a book and seventeen booklets. These seventeen small books are texts or visual essays compiled by Ivan Vladislavić, who edited the project, and the artists, together with commissioned pieces, or a combination of approaches. Some of the booklets’ authors took an imaginative route through the content, writing fiction or narrative responses. The artists and editor assembled these booklets into a timeline, with the cover image on each booklet corresponding to a photograph in the main book.

The fourth tower, The Box That Becomes a Book, relates to a more recent period when the artists found themselves once again en route to bookmaking, anticipating the publication by Steidl of Ponte City Revisited: 54 Storeys. The Box That Becomes a Book holds the artists’ intentions and wishes for this forthcoming publication – a more traditionally ‘bookish’ housing that is accessible for readers.