Welcome, Bjarke Ingels!

With the arrival of 2025, we will inaugurate Instalment 8 of the editorial project 10x10x10, by which, for ten years straight, ten architects will be the guest editors of ten issues each. We are starting to see the contours of our destination: 100 years of Domus magazine. This rare, rather unique arrival point will be celebrated with all the famous figures that have guided us in our endeavour: Michele De Lucchi, Winy Maas, David Chipperfield, Tadao Ando, Jean Nouvel, Steven Holl + Toshiko Mori, and Norman Foster. I thank them for making the Domus experience so special. Since 1928, the magazine has been analysing the present through architecture, design, art, and community life. The ever-new and complex challenges of the world are becoming paradoxical, which is why we thought of Bjarke Ingels as the next guest editor. His vision as a cultured, future-oriented, and globally ambitious architect is post-ideological, postmodern, and imaginative. His self-described oxymoronic approach combines tradition and subversion, making him a star architect and one of the 100 most influential people in 2016 according to the American news magazine Time.

After studying at the Royal Danish Art Academy School of Architecture in his native Copenhagen and at the Barcelona School of Architecture, Ingels worked at the Rem Koolhaas office in Rotterdam, where he internalised how the programme of requirements guides projects’ conception and volumetric definition. The same orientation is found in his agenda for Domus, which contains a "materialist manifesto" that gives the word a fresh, new meaning. You will find it attached to this monograph and put into practice in the next ten issues of the magazine. A natural and highly engaging communicator, Ingels has radically changed the ways and type of language that we use to talk about design. This exercise began years ago with his first book, Yes is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution (2009), an exuberant architectural comic strip conceived and self-published by Ingels, who as a boy wanted to become a cartoonist.

I am happy to welcome Bjarke Ingels on board at Domus and hope that he will have a most satisfying experience with us and our community.

Opening image: Bjarke Ingels. Photo Claus Troelsgaard