India

In the February 2015 issue of Domus India, we feature texts that are essentially ruminations on design and the designer.

Gautam Bhatia’s Punjabi Baroque and Other Memories of Architecture precisely points to a condition where the rigidity of thoughts we subscribe to get fixated on the sets of images; and then we keep expecting the limited set of such images to appear and reappear and produce a set of aspirations, only imaginable in a narrow-way through a limited pool of elements and objects; a vicious pool of limitations and undernourished thinking we decide to live in under the garb of aspirations or traditions. But the designer has to think in many directions, and float in the arena of culture and politics, its abstractions and details. How would designs integrate the worlds within them, and become part of the world as well – not one place, not one region, not one climate but belong to humanity, the cosmos of human life and experience, that speaks about life and not red soil or black! Prem Chandavarkar addresses this, and an audience of graduating students in his text — it is also what one senses as we read through the series of texts that flow into our trigger-subject-line — what we talk about when we talk design. We then explore what is “tradition” all about? Is “tradition” responsible towards a section of humanity, or rather every good tradition should have as its goal and responsibility the general critical outlook and development of the human world? Traditions may emerge from specific conditions, and their specificities are about the details they grow from – but then what says that tradition should be limited to that specificity and detail from which it gets its nativity? Good traditions would, and should expand to the world at large, the condition of how we live and how we see the world wee occupy. Can tradition be the revolution? Should we have not long before left back the question of “tradition and individual talent”? But moved on to“'tradition as dialectics”. In some buildings we have discussed and reviewed in the journeys of this magazine have lead towards these questions, including the design for the Alternative Development Headquarters designed by Ashok B Lall featured in this issue.
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