One of Oefner’s ongoing projects is what he calls Spatial Books, inspired by the herbariums he used to make in biology class. Rather than press leaves or plants on paper, he first encases the object he has selected—a vintage Brionvega radio, say, or a Nike Warrior sneaker—in a block of clear resin. Then, after the material has set, he painstakingly slices the result into a series of cross sections, or pages, that he binds together like a book. “It is about distorting reality, which is another big topic in my work,” he says of transforming an object from three dimensions into two. In one sense, he destroys the object: the sliced-up radio is silent; the futuristic athletic shoe can’t be worn. In another sense, he both preserves and creates a new way of looking at such iconic things.

Earlier this fall, Ralph Lauren commissioned Oefner to make a Spatial Book of a Bentley Blower, a supercharged (and now super-rare) relic of the interwar auto-racing period. Oefner never laid hands on Ralph’s own 1929 Blower, but the shoe-sized custom model that he worked from replicated the original in minute detail. In his studio, he shows me the keg-sized pressure chamber in which clear, gel-like resin hardened around the Blower overnight, and the bandsaw that he used to cut—very, very slowly—through the embalmed vehicle. Each pristine slice took two hours.