Architecture

Domus India

The Silence Of Our Gods

Silence is not only a passive condition but a creative opportunity to construct our space, our representations and ourselves.

Domus India

Finding The City

A tactile narrative explores how guidebooks for Mumbai have transformed over the years, and traces the kind of users they were perhaps meant to be for

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030 turin

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in search of a global project

in the english countryside outside sheffield, the collective universal everything operates under the guidance of its founder and creative director matt pyke. this versatile graphic designer tells us about his way of combining digital art, graphics and architecture, and how communication and imagery bind with architectural surfaces to create engrossing atmospheres that are sometimes interactive.

Domus India

In The End: Architecture

After having founded and directed the Architekturzentrum Wien for over 20 years, Dietmar Steiner steps down with an exhibition, a conference and a publication covering the most important stages in the career of this internationally acclaimed architect, researcher, critic, publicist and curator, who for 60 years has been a key player in the field.

Domus India

Fold / Unfold

Through a recently-concluded solo exhibition, artist Sonia Khurana explores the motifs of interiority and embodiment, and gathers several ‘vignettes across time that place the body in an oblique relation to diffused feminist aesthetics of the counter-spectacle and performative resistance’

Domus India

The State Of Housing In India

An introductory seminar on the The State of Housing in India was held with an intent to create a collective dialogue regarding the proposed exhibition on the same subject, and to facilitate a conversation within the community of professionals and citizens at large. The seminar attempted to look at housing and its relationship with urbanisation, and by extension, its relationship to livelihood and amenities, which are otherwise unfortunately overlooked.

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The Art Of Subterfuge: Slipping Past Borders

Artist Shilpa Gupta’s recently concluded solo exhibition Drawing in the Dark alludes to clandestine movements and practices in borderlands, and to the metaphor of the line or threshold that links several of her works. The show is part of Gupta’s ongoing investigation into interrelations between structures, specifically those of the state and the individual, and their rescaling as encountered at, what is both frontier and periphery.

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The Stacked House

Le Corbusier’s immeuble-villas; the stacked houses studied by Diotallevi and Marescotti; and the habitat marocain in Casablanca by Georges Candilis/AtBat Afrique are three modernist references examined by Giorgio Peghin as a typology still of interest today.

Domus India

Wang Hui - The Five Dragons Temple, Ruicheng City, Cina

This exemplary architectural and landscape regeneration project has restored worth to China’s oldest surviving Taoist temple in a programme to renovate and conserve the historic site executed with the adoption of traditional building methods and in a perfect balance of nature, expertise, history and innovation.

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Column, Sculpture, Wall

Paying homage to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 30 years after the reconstruction of his Pavilion, the Fundació Mies van der Rohe in Barcelona organised a symposium presenting the latest research on the German master. We publish an extract from a talk by Fritz Neumeyer at the beginning of the study days.

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the medium is architecture

with a simple plan that accommodates all the elements and symbolism of temple architecture, a temple complex uses a functional and relatable design programme to create a socio-cultural space that is now an integral part of the everyday village-life. the design draws much from its surroundings, and its users, who, with a severe sense of clarity of what they expected, helped to further nuance the design.

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exhibition design in the palestra grande in the pompeii archaeological site

after creating a pyramid in the pompeii amphitheatre, francesco venezia returns to the same archaeological site with a new intervention. compositional skill and virtuoso craftsmanship mark the insertion of this new exhibition space in the north wing of the palestra grande portico: it is a true machine for exhibiting, creating a subtle interplay of memories and analogies between ancient and modern, between archaeology and museology.

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Of Resolutions And Reading Lists

Author Alberto Manguel’s compendium on twelve books he loves can perhaps act as an incentive for one to abide by a reading list for the new year

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Álvaro Siza in Italia. IL Grand Tour 1976-2016

The lengthy and deeply felt relationship between this Portuguese maestro and Italy is the subject of a beautiful exhibition dedicated to him by the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome. We offer our readers Siza’s highly personal account of his love for Italy, especially his two favourite cities, Naples and Venice.

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Keying Into a Modern History

A recent book outlines the story of the typewriter in India, narrating its journey from the 1950s to the end of the last century. It chronicles how the humble typewriter was not just another machine but a facilitator of social change and economic efficacy, and a rather wondrous instrument in the daily life of the common man.

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Shroffleón A Mineral Nature

In a diverse urban fabric where buildings of heritage and historical value co-exist with numerous, burgeoning high-rises, a project in the locale of Bandra in Mumbai is a harmonious addition, owing to its delightful, yet functional architectural details, thereby offering a striking material tactility to its users.

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​On Beauty And The Impossibility Of Defining It

For the 300th anniversary of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s birth, the m.a.x. museo of Chiasso dedicates to this German master of classical culture an important exhibition focusing on his fundamental work, Monumenti antichi inediti, presenting, among numerous documents, all of the 208 engraved plates from the 1767 editio princeps published in two volumes and part of the museum’s collections.

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Kumbh in Venice

In our view, a framing of this phenomenon under the rubric of Ephemeral Urbanism is a more inspirational category than the Informal City, for it implies the transitionary rather than the absolute.

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true stories of false cities: the harbinger's testimony

an exhibition of sculptures – fantastical creatures, quasi-architectural elements, and geometrical forms reminiscent of weapons and artillery – conceptualises questions of life and violence, where the artist, sahej rahal, tries to re-imagine the destroyed mythical city of muziris through a colonial-era building.

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monumental, fragile beauty

fusing traditional bundela with mughal courtly architecture, in addition to european and persian stylistic influences, the temples of orchha display deceptively delicate features that reflect both a sense of ornamentation and fortification. the lakshminarayan temple, in particular, could help us map out the decorative, stylistic and religious programmes of other such structures, and present an insight into life of medieval architecture in india.

Domus India

The Louvre At Abu Dhabi

Sen Kapadia dwells upon the design of the newly-constructed Louvre in Abu Dhabi and how the structure lends itself to the elements of nature to create an interplay of dancing light and shadows

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To Review A Practice

To Review A Practice

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Making Places, Not Buildings

S.P.A Design could well represent a set of younger studios in India that have achieved a sizeable amount of built projects and reached a measure of maturity, working through times of economic boom as well as uncertain geographies and unclear landscapes. To review such a body of work through detailed drawings and sketches, photos and notes, is akin to researching an archive of the contemporary. The exhibition presents the contemporary in architecture — in its built and breathing avatar, as flesh and blood of our times. Architecture as mode and style appears scattered in the current context, but in exhibitions such as these, the strands can actually help us weave a story, even if only a provisional or limited one for now. Photos Amit Pasricha 

Domus India

Distributed Over Forms Of Experience

This is the second issue in our seventh annual cycle, but also the last for the year 2017, and this issue is special as it marks a milestone in the journey of DOMUS in India. There is a transition we signaled with the inclusion of a poetry section, beautifully curated and advised upon by poet, critic, and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote; this was to open the space of practice in general, but of architecture practice specifically.

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Snehal Nagarsheth 23/B: The Accidental Memory Collector

Made up almost entirely of salvaged doors and windows, 23/B in Ahmedabad oscillates between extremes – it is either a transparent, light, and airy pavilion-like space or an enclosed treasure chest that reveals nothing to the outside world. Going beyond superficial appropriation of the salvaged objects, the design upholds the integrity of the original elements by carefully articulating and organising them, while also questioning ideas such as ownership, site specificity, found objects, and memories associated with ‘home’

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Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist

On the occasion of the exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City, Kenneth Frampton gave an overview of this prolific landscape architect from São Paulo, whose 60-year career was entwined with that of the greatest architects of his times. His work marked a formal turning point in the art of gardens, and by being a committed horticulturalist and trailblazing ecologist, Burle Marx promoted an innovative botanical research centre dedicated to native Brazilian plants.

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The Flan And The Knitting Needle

In a conference held recently at the School of Architecture of the University of Texas in Austin, Alberto Campo Baeza examined and highlighted, with his usual authentic passion, the moments in which the intellectual pleasures generated by architecture are at their strongest.

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If Not Political, It Is Not Design

Architecture is on the threshold of change, but it risks being reduced to the decorative arts unless architects accept the inherent politics of it

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Sculpture And Technology

This British designer offers Domus a preview of the contents of the important exhibition that the Centre Pompidou is dedicating to his work: not a retrospective, but the opportunity to observe his body of work immersed in a display designed to interconnect with the “exposed industrial truth” of the building by Rogers and Piano, 40 years later.