Archive. Library. Laboratory…

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

- Kaiwan Mehta

The last nine years have seen crucial dialogues and discussions around architecture and the built environment in India. This magazine has indeed played a crucial role in producing the many critical discussion, reflections, and theses on architecture in contemporary India, as well the nature of the contemporary in India vis-à-vis the visual and built environment especially. The contemporary has been a condition of culture and the present and not essential a binary to either history or the modern. Various moments in architecture’s history have been brought within the pages of this magazine without any indulgence in hyper-historicism or any romantic dalliance with the past. The past is archive and archaeological, the past is alive and present especially in India, where the last 30 years of national politics has revolved around a monument not in use and its perverse destruction 28 years ago. In a country like India where Indian-ness became a fashionable catchword and the past got reduced to a ready-reckoner of a few elements and cases to be emulated and shabbily reproduced ad-infinitum in the name of being ‘authentic’ or ‘original’ or worse, ‘local’. In fact, the pages of this magazine have constantly invested in curatorial and research projects that cumulatively would contribute to a history of design and architecture in India.