The Silence Of Our Gods

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

Revisiting A Royal Past

Located in the Kodagu district of Karnataka, the Nalknad Palace was built in the late 18th century during the reign of King Vira Rajendra, perhaps as a place of refuge for him as he was then fighting Tipu Sultan. The two-storeyed structure is replete with pavilions, intricately carved wooden pillars, and a host of paintings across several rooms. While it is not yet known how long ago the paintings were made, they depict scenes from the court and images of royalty.

John Berger's ‘Bento's Sketchbook'

While a plethora of letters and writings of the 17th-century Dutch philiosopher Bento de Spinoza were published over the years, his sketchbook was never found. When critic and writer John Berger was gifted a blank drawing book, he promptly dubbed it as Bento’s Sketchbook, using the imaginative space to explore the process of drawing, storytelling, and Spinoza’s life

From Railways To Ateliers

A cultural platform experimenting with new approaches to producing and exhibiting, the LUMA Arles workshop for artists, curators, scientists and designers is also open to the public

Essay Kinetic City

Architect and pedagogue Rahul Mehrotra dwells upon how by restructuring the city-making process, the 'Kinetic' and 'Static' Cities can be intertwined beyond the physical and can engage the inhabitants of the city

The Public Knowledge Space OMA, Qatar National Library, Doha

Simplicity and complexity Gulf states and the public realm Enclosed urban spaces

The Walkable Roof Hong Kong West Kowloon Station

One of the East’s most important infrastructure nodes, designed by Andrew Bromberg at Aedas

How Letters Mark The City

Signs are the markers of a city and need to be in the place they are marking

Indian Aesthetics Museum In Transit

Spread across the environs of Terminal 2 of Mumbai’s international airport, the Jaya He Museum houses a diverse collection of art and installations, blending it with various aspects of the architecture, design and culture, thus creating a unique experience for those transiting through this large space

Tribute I M Pei (1917-2019)

Kenneth Frampton, in his book Modern Architecture: A Critical History, in chapter four (Place, Production & Scenography, International Theory and Practice since 1962), discussed the imaginative interpretation of Fuller’s project on geodesic domes, Kikutake on Marine City, Isozaki on the Gunma Prefectural Museum, Rogers & Pianos’ Pompidou Center and Foster + Partners’ Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank.

A Moment Of Pause

A compilation of essays by American poet Mary Oliver brims with her meditations on reading, on the natural world, the idea of home, and her creative endeavours

The Observer

In Taipei, OMA experiments with a new type of centre for the performing arts.

Design Debates India

An ongoing exhibition that marks 100 years of the Bauhaus comprises a significant discourse on the ‘India story’, indicating how another idea of modernity, probably unique to a colonial encounter in the Indian subcontinent, with a history unfolding much on its own terms, was shaping a story of design and culture in another part of the world as the Bauhaus unfolded in Europe.

Difficult Relationships Between Maps And The Landscape

The landscape is everything a map fails to grasp of the world and to express in terms of the separation between subject and object, placing some distance between them.

How To Design Lightscapes

Can light transform a space into a place? We asked Elettra Bordonaro, the lighting designer who led the three-year research programme Social Lightscapes Workshop Series, created to integrate social and behavioural sciences and lighting design.

The Fabric Of A City

A recent book on the city of Lucknow focuses on the idea of a place not only as a geographical territory but as a part of people’s social lives, their identity, memory, and a sense of belonging and pride, each contributing to place-making in specific ways

A Mining Town The Wild West Where Women Rule The Roost

A mining village in the New Mexico desert provides the backdrop for seven episodes of Godless and is the largest Western film-set ever built

What Landscape Will Live On, After Us?

Antigone is Tacita Dean’s latest experimental film, a reflection on the natural and cultural landscape.

Children Are Tomorrow's Urban Planners Future Milan: Workshop With Winy Maas

On 26 November 2018, Winy Maas presented his project for Domus ’19 at a state school in Milan, following a workshop that involved the students, who imagined the city of the future. Starting from their neighbourhood, they gave shape to their ideas and wrote a letter to the Mayor to have their proposals realised

Tribute Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019)

With his insistence on intellectual rigour went an intellectual generosity, an expansiveness of intellectual scope, and a great ability to inspire.

Indian Aesthetics - The Maidoms Of Charaideo In Assam

Massive brick-vaulted hemispherical structures covered by an earthen mound and topped with an open brick pavilion, the maidoms , scattered across Assam, tell a fascinating history of the burial of the dead royals

Books Celestial Stories

An illustrated narrative about an officer who lives on the moon, Mooncop — filled with action and adventure — also dwells upon the tropes of loneliness, pathos, and the mundane

A New World Map

Through the voices of the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman and 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg at the Davos Forum, a new generation is crying out for action.

Instant Megalopolis

Elastic urban design Superbly instantaneous Reusable infrastructure Urban metabolism

V&A Dundee Kengo Kuma

Kengo Kuma’s architecture creates relationships, flows and circulation. The V&A Dundee acts like a gate between river and city

Sen Kapadia Architect NID Post-Graduate Campus Gandhinagar, Gujarat

A project from the office of architect Sen Kapadia — a campus for an academic institution in Gandhinagar — aims for monumentality through enduring spatial values rather than exaggerated scale.

A Confluence Of Cultures

Spanning a period of over a million years, a recently concluded exhibition comprising over 200 invaluable objects chronicles the history of the Indian subcontinent against the backdrop of what was happening concurrently across the world. It encapsulates the idea of syncretism in the many stories shared by India with other nations through the predominant tropes of early civilisations, trade, faith, empires, and the quest for freedom, among others.

Sen Kapadia Architect Bhavsar House Ahmedabad, Gujarat

The role of the architect as an artist and designer is very firmly yet weightlessly articulated in the almost sculptural design of a house.

Robin Hood Gardens Disappearing Worlds

The film by Urban-Think Tank reminds us that the Smithsons’s ideas about the ties between buildings, users and architectural sites no longer have the value they once did.

Le Corbusier's Journey To The East

Taking stock of a collection of letters, columns, and notes, a book on Le Corbusier records the iconic architect’s observations during his many peregrinations.