Place Matters - Where Would We Be Without Places

Spitalfields in London was not designed exclusively by architects but alongside a new profession. What happens when the “placemakers” take control?

Effortful plans

Affinities

Baradari, City Palace Jaipur

Representing Jaipur in the context of today

So The Object Building Will Transform Society?

Revathi Kamath, Kamath Design Studio

र is for Ravana

Aesthetics and India

When circles are scales: notes on the new “small”

The current pandemic has not, as many commentators have pointed out, forced a whole new social order on the world.

Toshiko Mori ‒Toshiko Mori Architect

Architecture for resource stability

Locked. Unlock

ART AND POLITICS

Debating tactile engagements

Revathi Kamath, Kamath Design Studio

Archive. Library. Laboratory…

With this issue, we enter our tenth annual cycle of DOMUS India.

Aldo Rossi: From scale to scale

Domus presented the Teatro del Mondo or Venetian Theatre – a floating structure designed by Aldo Rossi in 1979 for the 1980 Venice Biennale – in issue 602 (January 1980).

Suspending the city. Silencing the stranger

One of the biggest calamities of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the city – the right to the city, the right to livelihood, the right to move, the right to being public. The city, historically, has not only emerged as the key location for the exchange of ideas and technologies in a globalizing world, but also the site to possibly earn a livelihood with some semblance of dignity, if not more.

Our horizontal Babel

Already more than half of humanity lives in cities, and the urbanisation process advances at so vertiginous a rate that we will soon be able to describe the planet as a built globe, with its population agglomerated in metropolises and the surrounding environment transformed into an artificial landscape. From the city’s mesh of relationships comes its potential and lure, manifested in the territory like a magnetic field that is irresistible to rural populations, a multitude of iron filings dragged beyond remedy towards the metropolitan magnet.

Life in the Anthropocene

SARS-CoV-2 has penetrated our world. Here in Central Europe, it has drastically changed our everyday lives and society. We have never experienced such a situation before and we have yet to develop a language to discuss it. People are even talking about a war against the virus. But against which enemy is this war actually being waged?

Radical participation and collaborative design

The expert is being questioned across society. In Zurich, planners are addressing this with argumentative design

Urban Form and Smart Urbanism

A recently released book is an academic reflection on questions surrounding new planning initiatives and the role of urban design in creating spatial and cultural transformations in second-tier cities.

Good practice - Farshid Moussavi

In the first of 10 discussions about the changing demands of the profession, the guest editor visits Farshid Moussavi to discuss subterfuge and micropolitics

Notes on nature and art Wandering Violin Mantis

In a recently concluded exhibition, artist Nibha Sikander creates stunningly lifelike creatures — birds, insects and moths — all handmade from paper. It is her preternatural rendering of the natural in all its gorgeous detail that summons forth, in the viewer, a wave of rapture.

THE COVER STORY

In January 2017, Domus India set out on a new experiment — the cover of the magazine would be specially designed by a designer, artist, architect or photographer in discussion with the editorial and design team of the magazine. Here, we present the covers from the last two years.

Imagine

On speculation: landscape, city-making and imagination

Exhibition Fields of Eros and Enchantment

An ongoing exhibition of artist Bhagyashree Suthar’s works reflects her fascination with architecture and geometry, and are a play of the fantastical and the familiar. Suthar gathers images and objects from everyday life, and is familiar with the histories and contexts of drawing up futures. She is also invested in the use of mathematical constructions and abstractions towards mapping these languages of the future world. From the Fibonacci series and Fractals, Parametricism and Visionary Futures of Archigram to the drawings and models of Lebbeus Woods or the architectures of Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry — they all build a library of this investigation for Suthar. She brings into her work a whole history of humankind’s interest in shaping worlds of perfection — places of balance and cosmic as well as earthly magnificence and sublimity — utopia — something that never exists, a never-place!

The privatisation of the public realm

During the past decade Milan has hosted several stunning urban renewals, ushering in a new age of globalisation.

Milan 2030: 88 squares for 88 neighbourhoods

Milan is changing. Its population reached and topped the 1.4-million mark for the first time at the start of October, when the city reported its number of inhabitants to be 1,420,000.

Indian Aesthetics The Wonders of the Konark Museum

While the Konark Temple in Odisha is admired for its architecture and iconography, the site museum, in contrast, is marked by its simplicity, focusing not on itself but on the temple. The many galleries are dotted with sculptures of gods and goddesses, apsaras and mythical creatures occupying pride of place.

Can art change us?

JR: the tale of a free artist

Indian Aesthetics - Temples of the Yoginis

Circular and open to the skies, the temples of the Yoginis are few and far between. While most of them are currently in Central India, extending to coastal Odisha in the east, and Rajasthan in the west, based on sculptural and literary evidence, it is clear that they must have, at one point, thrived across the country.

The Discovery Of India

The Discovery of India is a permanent exhibition display at the Nehru Centre in Mumbai. Designed by the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, it is a physical manifestation of Jawaharlal Nehru’s magnum opus The Discovery of India — a book that was a key text during India’s struggle for independence from colonial rule as well as in the shaping of the first decade of independent India. It set the tone for a nation that is inclusive and believed in ‘unity in diversity’. An important book of the twentieth century, manifest in the objects and tableaux is alive here in the exhibition, reminding us of its relevance, more so today. Designed and composed using various forms of visual culture — objects, prints, scenographies, cabinet displays and recreations, including the television series Bharat Ek Khoj — the displays draw from archaeology, history, art history, architecture, anthropology, thereby shaping an intense experience which is informed, rich and thoughtful. This photo essay, based on the current status of the exhibition, invites one to not only engage with the visual rendering of the text but also with the design of messages and ideas, presented here through some extracts from the book itself.

Architecture As Symbol And Idea

Architecture : Weaving the aspirations and struggles of a new nation into a building A memorial to independent India’s first and most dynamic Prime Minister

A Velocity Of Being

A collection of illustrated letters to children about why we read reveals the agency of words, the power of articulation, and why reading is essential to make a good life, reminding us that language is a delicate yet powerful tool.