Abin Design Studio: The Contemporary Experience of Hybridity

The ornamental expression in the two projects from Abin Design Studio featured here is not a return of the ornament, nor is it nostalgic –— what one precisely means is that the manner in which the ornamental is carried out, and sits in some kind of discussion with the more modern language of the building plan and formal expression, there is a concern with hybridity, inconsistency, as well as equivocality that marks cultural experience today.

Revolutionising Welfare

Giuseppe Guzzetti believes architecture and design have positive effects on people’s dignity. Fondazione Cariplo launches Cittàintorno, an urban regeneration programme

Practice Of Principle

A few months ago we lost Hasmukh Patel, a senior architect in India, and as a mark of respect for his contribution to architecture and education, an exhibition of some of his works was organised at CEPT University where he once served as academic director. This exhibition — drawing on a book on his lifetime of work, published a few years ago — critically draws our attention to the ways in which architecture in modern India was practised. A certain view on architecture practice and modern aesthetics, values and forms of making has been constantly promoted in the few histories of modern architecture history in India, but some recent biographies now threaten to dislodge what we took for granted about architecture in post-Independence and modern India. This exhibition itself helps us realise a world of architecture design that actually shaped built environments for everyday life in a modernising India. 

The Worlds Within... What Is Found There?

An exhibition titled A World in the City themed around zoos and botanical gardens recently opened at the IFA Gallery in Stuttgart. The invited curator from India explored the theme and expanded it into a concept for the show in two ways – firstly, the colonial history of institutions such as world expositions, zoos, gardens and museums where these become sites for knowledge production about the world at large as we see it even today, as well as the imagination of a ‘public’ — the idea of a modern viewing-consuming audience; secondly – it explores our recent history of the hyper-relationship with nature through issues such as Sustainability, Veganism, nature trails, wildlife television channels, and so forth. The curator invited a set of seven works from four artists, as well as a collection of poems and essays from a poet to present in a subtle and nuanced way, the relationship that we share as humans and as a civilisation with nature, the world, and the cosmos

Studio Lotus - Comfort In Construction?

Urban clutter and the struggle for space can raise some queer situations — where is one located; what is one aspiring towards; and how will one respond to a neighbourhood of mixed imaginations? As different imaginations sit next to each other — where land values, access to space, and hope for a better living will struggle for survival and identity — urban neighbourhoods will be geographies of new complexities, varying social and economic values jostling for space and existence. In such a situation, how is the architect to respond? Is it possible for one to completely turn away from the urban clutter, or rather, is that the right thing to do — completely ignore or blind yourself to a reality of the neighbourhood? How does one preserve one’s self from the troubles of chaos yet not disconnect with the reality of negotiations? A house recently designed in a Delhi neighbourhood precisely jostles with these questions — as evident in its design — and decides to adopt the trope of the veil, one that preserves yet connects, one that is transparent yet contains a privacy. This house continues to connect the inside and the outside as much as it veils one from the other — juggling context!

040 Milan

In Meditazioni sulla felicità (“Meditations on Happiness”), published in Milan in 1763, Pietro Verri writes, “A wise man’s happiness begins from within and then extends to the objects he creates,” and continues by saying,  “The happiness of each of us is achieved in public happiness.”

‘Hangar For The Passerby' At The Kiran Nadar Museum Of Art, Delhi

Hangar for the Passerby is an exhibition about artist collectives — both collaborative and participatory art practices — in India. 

Beyond Pretty Things

As the Indian academic year sets rolling for another annual cycle, it is always an occasion for one to begin thinking about the broader field of practice.

Experiments And Arguments In Design

Every object of everyday use and interaction is an object of design; design is the value of idea, labour, and expression put together. It is a debate whether design should remain subservient to the everyday existence of the object, or design should overtly express itself as the statement and part-purpose of the existence of any object. Architect and designer Rooshad Shroff’s recent exhibition comprising pieces of furniture responds to a contemporary moment of excess, access, and availability. The excess of options available are explored; the ability of a craftsman challenged by the properties of a material; the access to craftsmanship as labour, as skill, and as tradition of knowledge, is something that Shroff takes advantage of, but also keeps stretching the limits of this relationship between craftsmanship and knowledge existing within the practice today. The title of the exhibition is then, perhaps, fitting enough: ‘15,556’, or Fifteen Thousand Five Hundred and Fifty-Six Man Hours, referring to the number of hours taken to make the pieces on display

Seen From Afar

DIARY OF A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH A FORGOT TEN ITALY

When Business Makes Culture

LA RINASCENTEA CREATIVE LABORATORY

The Busride Design Studio: Soupy Spaces

With a brief that mentioned ‘make mistakes’, the interior design of a sprawling house in Pune is interpreted through a series of folding and compact objects – a multi-purpose cube and a seating terrain – that make the interior space an ambiguous and more conceptual arena. By transforming the overall experience from ‘living in rooms’ to ‘living amongst objects’, the design offers the opportunity for unpredictable relationships to be discovered with everyday object.

Feedback: Wang Weijen Hong Kong

In a spatial odyssey looking down on Hong Kong’s Central District from the Victoria Peak, one would see a wave of verticals springing up from the sloping terrain all the way down to the water edge.

My Taranto: A Critical Walk

To the eyes of all the world, Taranto is a city in a tragic state of degradation and abandon. Michael Jakob sees “over-planning” as the cause of this decline and believes an act of love is required for the good and the ugly, applying landscape architecture to heal its living spaces.

Mathew & Ghosh Architects A Duality In Design

Located on an urban site surrounded by existing buildings, the House with a Veil is perched high at the second floor level, among the foliage of the trees. Its veil-inspired screen on the street-facing side adds to the aesthetics, while protecting the house from natural elements, providing privacy, and allowing the architects to open up the house on the other side into a tropical-forest-like garden – all aligned to the inhabitants’ aspirations for their dream home.

Ateliers Jean Nouvel Louvre Abu Dhabi

A new museum conceived not as a building but as an actual piece of city is the extraordinary project given to us by Jean Nouvel in Abu Dhabi. Hosting the story of humanity, this small citadel constructed with buildings, squares and alleys is umbrellaed for comfort by a magnificent dome that forms and creates a layer of artificial nature on top.

Renzo Piano Building Workshop GES-2, V-A-C Foundation Moscow

The institution devoted to contemporary Russian art has commissioned the Renzo Piano Building Workshop to convert a two-hectare urban site into a cultural centre. GES-2 is now an open-air building site. Forty years after the inauguration of Centre Georges Pompidou, how does one design a “non-museum”?

Steven Holl Let's Start From Music

Architecture, like music, surrounds and engulfs us: it's an immersive, engrossing experience. A conversation between Steven Holl and Michele De Lucchi.

Life On Earth...

The vivid shades of red and pink that signify the very vibrancy of life may come as a bit of a shock when seen in a cemetery... but then doesn’t a tomb or a grave also represent a life that once lived on earth? And isn’t it wonderful how design sensibilities inspired memory and life on earth? The unassuming Roman Catholic Cemetery in Agra — believed to be the oldest burial ground in North India — dates back to the mid-1500s. While the land was initially used by Armenian Christian traders to bury their dead, it later came to be used by the Portuguese, Italians, French, Germans, the Dutch and the English as well...

Somaya And Kalappa Consultants Interwoven Walks...

The intimacy of architectural productions, the moments of creative explorations and industrial labour involved in the design and making of built environments is now explored and experienced at a new platform of creativity and production — the mode of the artist

Is There An Indian Way Of Designing?

An essay attempts to dissect the all-embracing notions of art, craft, design, and technique, revolving around the idea of ‘Indian’ homogenisation and plurality in tandem with current design practices

Ettore Sottsass

It is not easy to write about Ettore Sottsass in Domus, after he contributed for decades to the conception and creation of our magazine.

Indian Aesthetics On The Trail Of Jain Art In Tamil Nadu

The remains of deserted Jain cave sites, weathered rock-cut reliefs, sculptures discovered in fields and now displayed in museums, as well as the few temples still in use in Tamil Nadu give a glimpse of a thriving Jain culture of a bygone era.

Water Risks Spell Opportunity

DiscussionDe-risking the world Water management as leverage of prosperity Design as catalyst for change

Photo Essay Ceilings

In 2011, a Mumbai-based photojournalist was assigned to make photographs of a brothel in Sangli to accompany a reporter's story for a news magazine. While the photos did not eventually get filed, they are testimony to how a different viewing perspective can help one see a reality, as much as open up the question of urban interiority. These photos enable us to review a sense of space and architecture within dense towns and urban neighbourhoods, where it is the private that becomes public, where the insides of spaces ask for a narrative beyond the normative inside-outside binary used to view cities and its spaces. While the photographer contemplates the ethics of his task at hand, this set of photographs also questions the systems of documentation and analyses used to capture spaces, cities, and architecture.

Artefact In A Neighbourhood

Located in Bansberia, a busy town on the west bank of the Hooghly river, a small corner on a plot belonging to a community became the site for an architectural intervention that realises the neighbourhood as the confluence of the sacred and human, the celestial and political.

Planet Europe - Brussels 22.01.1972

Signing ceremony of the accession treaty of Denmark, Ireland, Norway and the United Kingdom to the European Community

Infrastructure As Foreign Policy

Building a new world order From Beijing to Madrid Infrastructure and power Neo-colonialism?

Eating The Crust

Mines + climate change Action vs extraction Uncomfortable truth

The Open City

From wireframe to reality The neoliberal city Open planning systems Porosity