A new book arts exhibition from celebrated notebook maker Moleskine is now on view at One World Trade Center’s One World Observatory, marking the first public exhibition of artwork in the attraction’s seven-year history.

Opened today, the Moleskine Foundation’s Detour New York exhibition features notebooks by the late architect Michael Graves, Italian architect Carlo Stanga, and this year’s Pritzker Prize winner Diébédo Francis Kéré.

According to the foundation, the suite of 75 individual artworks by various creative thinkers “celebrates how blank pages can become a work of art in themselves, providing moments of inspiration and introspection.” The exhibition is separated into five themes: Metamorphosis, Memory, Borders, Journey, and Imagination. Each notebook tells a different story, dream, or “distinctive way of being and relating to the world.”

In Memory, viewers can see this introspection perhaps most especially in the notebook provided by the Pritzker-winning new Goethe Institute architect, whose contribution detailed the same childhood roots of his design inspiration he described in a recent interview with NPR. The piece, which Kéré produced during a visit to the Venice Biennale in 2010, chronicles the architect’s observations on the differences in air circulation and heat absorption between the international art capital and his home village of Gando, Burkina Faso.

Sketchbook of Diébédo Francis Kéré, Contemporary Venice (2010). Video courtesy of the Moleskine Foundation.

Graves’ notebook from 2007 is also worthy of an up-close inspection. The drawing at its center renders an austere depiction of the architect’s Tuscan childhood, underneath which is an apparent and “irrational” love for architecture and the built environment.

The designers are joined by several artists, including, Pentagram's Paula Scher, William Kentridge, and Icelandic supergroup Sigur Rós. Work from activist-cum-curator Dalaeja Foreman’s piece “Been Workin’” provides a toolkit for anti-gentrification resistance efforts in different communities of color.

The Moleskine Foundation's Detour New York is on view at the One World Observatory until May 22, 2022. More information about the Foundation’s archive and 1,300-object collection can be found here.