Domus, Evviva

In April’s editorial, Nicola Di Battista affirm that Domus is a magazine for architectural design and not about architectural design: meaning that he is no less interested in the end-product of that design than he is in the theoretical and practical work that underpins it.

This article was originally published on Domus 1001, April 2016.

 

Now that the celebrations surrounding the thousandth issue of Domus are over, we are left with a vivid awareness of the extraordinary human adventure undertaken by this magazine throughout its almost century-long history – an adventure recognised for the occasion by the large community of Domus as well as by a wider world.

I would like therefore to publicly thank first of all our publisher, Maria Giovanna Mazzocchi Bordone, and then those who have edited this magazine before me: Alessandro Mendini, Mario Bellini, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, François Burkhardt, Deyan Sudjic, Stefano Boeri, Flavio Albanese and Joseph Grima, who readily and enthusiastically contributed to the preparation of its issue 1000. To all of them I am profoundly grateful. Last but not least, I am particularly indebted to my indefatigable editorial staff. Month after month, they enable an impressive number of people and scholars to make their invaluable contributions to Domus, transforming contents, copy and projects into well-composed pages ready to be printed, so that each new issue can, nearly always on time, reach the newsstand and our readers. I want to express my gratitude for their marvellous work. The landmark number reached by this magazine in March was greeted first with jubilation, but also with a degree of perturbation. For its history, albeit written and vigorously endorsed by eminent figures from our recent past – and starting from Gio Ponti and Gianni Mazzocchi – belongs by now to each and all of us without exclusion.

This collective sentiment is perhaps the most relevant legacy that the magazine can offer its readers, old and new. It predisposes them to a positive state of mind and to a more serene view of the future. True, anniversaries in themselves always entail a heavy risk of complacency and rhetoric, from which we too at Domus are probably not exempt. We are, however, ready to run that risk if it involves bringing the magazine closer to its readers and, I have to say, especially to our younger ones who had not previously seen it as beneficial to them and who now instead increasingly look to Domus with passion and enthusiasm. Three years ago, when I took up the editorship of Domus, I stressed that the magazine, with its nearly 1,000 issues published in the course of almost a century, was a source of joy to me to be sure, but also a certain nervousness on being profoundly aware of the duty to continue a collective story that belongs to so many.
Now that the events of issue 1000 have receded and you are turning the pages of issue 1001, that nervousness has in part likewise receded. So we believe the time has come to sum up this period of time past, to reflect on how many of our basic goals we have managed  to accomplish, primarily that of constructing a clear-cut view on how  we inhabit places today. Before talking about this, it is right to remember that we set about this task with few certainties and many doubts. It must also be added, however, that we were driven by high hopes of doing well. The work done so far has been tough but deeply rewarding, whilst the constant achievement of the maximum has severely tested the stamina of our editorial staff and contributors. The first effect of all this has been on ourselves and, although some doubts remain, they have for the most part been dispelled. It is the work itself that has given us the answers we were looking for, in some cases even helping us to change our opinions and to establish ever more clearly the viewpoint that we felt we had to have. We can say that rather than changing the magazine, it is the magazine itself that has in part changed us.
I would like this Domus to be defined as “the magazine that tells stories”
For example, we have grown gradually more aware of working to create a journal for architectural design and not a magazine about architectural design. This is, moreover, a distinction of some importance to us, considering how the numerous architectural and design journals published today are increasingly up against competition from the new media, which can inform the public of contemporary developments in architecture and design more rapidly than a printed periodical. In affirming instead that Domus is a magazine for architectural design and its related disciplines, we mean that we are no less interested in the end-product of that design than we are in the theoretical and practical work that underpins it and makes it possible. Likewise we want to report on the ways in which the various architects and designers go about their work, each in their different ways. We are interested, too, in “what to do” or, again, in “what is useful” to architects or designers in the creating of their best work.  So in order to answer these questions, a number of border-crossings into different disciplines very often occur: from art to philosophy, from history to technology – never with the presumption of speaking of art, philosophy, history or technology or whatever, but simply with the desire to recount some of the stories produced by these disciplines. The stories are told, wherever possible, directly by the main characters who caused, determined and experienced them, while refraining from critical mediation, about which we shall be talking later.
These stories always lead up to the works in question, supporting but seldom chronicling them. Hardly ever written, they consequently vanish without trace. To tell stories of this type is in fact now the main feature of our Domus. Indeed I would like this Domus to be defined as “the magazine that tells stories”, long or short as they may be, provided they are dense and true, of people. These diverse stories, about architects, men and women, companies, products, houses, cities and other subjects, are told in order to establish a “history”, a complete collection of stories. They will help us to construct first of all the point of view that we need in order to live our time to the full. The stories will bring to mind the long journeys undertaken by people in their lives, and their varied ways of being. They will tell younger people about our and their more or less recent past, so that they will not think that we always have to start again from scratch – or if they do, that at least they will be doing so consciously and intentionally, after listening to these stories. Their purpose is to prevent forgetfulness but, most of all, to encourage everybody to do better, coming to build the foundation, support and touchstone of our work today.
All this clearly happens because we are living at a point in our contemporaneity when disciplines are no longer recognised fields of shared knowledge, but have, on the contrary, been transformed into  techniques. They may or may not be used, often to the detriment of our real needs. From this angle they are only dead languages, which can no longer speak clearly of their objectives, or prove adequate to people and their lives. For some decades now the disciplines of architectural design, of the arts and crafts, which so intensely expressed the spirit and history of the western world, have not been able to keep up the progress that had distinguished them previously, rendering them necessary and appreciated. On the contrary, their objectives have by now sunk so low as to be no longer recognised as collective realms of wisdom developed by countless people, but are valid only for their creators. At the moment, awareness of this entails a big stride forward in recognising first of all what we now lack and urgently need: the construction of a new theoretical and collective foundation for our actions, not by harking back nostalgically to the past nor by yearning for the future, but by staying firmly anchored to the present. If our story-telling has served to cultivate and to circulate a certain striving after possible change, we shall continue until that change has been implemented, until the new is manifested. At that point we will need only to endorse and cultivate it, letting ourselves be guided towards true innovations to construct a “habitation” better suited to our time. Now if this goal seems at last within reach again and can, we believe, soon, very soon, be reached, then it is essential to ponder the role played by criticism, which seems instead to have been the main absentee in our recent history.  This cumbersome and embarrassing absence has permitted just about everything.
A renewed role for criticism is essential today, on a par with the change that we would like to see in the field of architectural design
Criticism has renounced its fundamental role of removing the single product, the single design, from the gilded solation in which it is held by its creator, instead of dragging it into the tumult of our time, of our contemporaneity, to check whether it really has something to say or whether it is merely ineffective or, worse still, useless and ultimately harmful. Criticism is indispensable to our capacity to live more perceptively, to unite things that only in their togetherness can be of any new value to us. In this way architects are compelled to describe what they do, or better still, why. A renewed role for criticism is essential today, on a par with the change that we would like to see in the field of architectural design as a whole. Indeed, a new criticism could actually accelerate, determine and necessitate that change, which is why our magazine will carry on striving to recreate a critical approach to our discipline. Today the conditions for doing so once again exist, and we will be devoting every effort to achieving that end. To go back to the beginning of these notes, and with a view to understanding how much of the editorial project announced by this Domus has been fulfilled to date, we must say that as far as we are concerned, the outcome is very positive. Clearly, we do not presume to judge the contents, value and quality of what the magazine offers:  that is up to its readers, critics and anybody else wishing to do so. Our earnest intention was to establish a new view of habitation today, and that we have done – a clear-cut, non-sectarian view, which would not contemplate everything under the sun but would instead select from the myriad things proposed by our time. Among these, we have expressly not published the more eccentric, fashionable, bizarre and whimsical things. Instead, we have preferred to focus on the quieter works and texts, which are, however, more highly charged with expectations and hopes. For such works can incorporate and determine others, instead of excluding them; they are works that aspire to the new but not at any cost.
What a monthly periodical like ours can carry on its pages is clearly very little compared to the boundless global output. In any case we like to presume that this “very little”, if done with honesty and passion, can embody everything we need to better understand what we do – but also to understand what could be done, what we have not yet seen but would like soon to see fulfilled. Furthermore, we cannot forget that in this time of ours, by now completely globalised and interconnected, our magazine can best represent its own views only if it does not abandon its identity as a magazine founded and created in Milan, one which belongs to this city to the degree in which the city belongs to the magazine. Only by recognising, reiterating and stating this dual sense of belonging can we now address the whole world and every nation in it. 
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