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.

- Kaiwan Mehta

In times when designers and architects are getting into more boutique detailing, or are lost in the vastness of development wastelands, the magazine recalls the culture of human creativity, the role of design as intervention and action. Poetry and architecture are not simply talking to each other in these pages but are playing interesting games of challenge and collaboration; it is poetry in its most robust and aesthetic forms shaping or dismantling the ideas that architects and designers think they work with. In this issue the sense of reading the shape of practice is expanded and distributed over to two more areas – the moving image, and the world of terracotta. It is not about the specificity of either the poetic mode or the moving image of a materiality of a certain kind, but it is the sense of expanded practices, and where do they situate within these webs of working, thinking, and externalising. The pages of this magazine have focused always on reading the architecture world of practice, materiality, and ideating. In this process the search is constantly to work out and discern ways of thinking about, around, and with, architecture. But then what is architecture? That is the primary question. And then, just because this is an architecture magazine in India, does it have to carry the outmoded burden of defining how things are Indian? The space from which we speak and work is indeed situated geographically in a certain location.