This issue of Domus is entitled "Instant heritage". Winy Maas starts his editorial talking about urbanism, that "is all about thinking about the future and imagining how the present might be improved”, underlining the importance of our heritage, seen not as something to be demolished but something we should take care of. The cover of the issue shows Matter Design and CEMEX Global R&D project, Walking Assembly, made of concrete using 3D printing. We talk about digital innovation, the impact of networks in the production of objects and architectures, and we present five projects that, with digital innovation, can promote a return to the pre-modern ethos of community sharing.
Urban planning. In Baku, the past becomes a resource: the oil capital of Azerbaijan changes its shape through the construction of new buildings and the renovation of Soviet-era buildings, becoming the "Paris of the Caspian” once again. Europe, on the other hand, is the protagonist of Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer's novel, Grand Hotel Europa, which describes a continent that lives with the weight of the past and with tourism as the only revenue model. The future city is presented in "Frictionless urbanism", with five visions for urban aerial mobility.
Architecture: ZUS, the Rotterdam-based architecture and urban planning studio, recounts its "city of permanent temporariness", a place in constant transformation and always incomplete.
It tells the story of the construction of the Colón Towers in Madrid from 1969, which at the time was striking for the technical innovation of their construction process, and the landscape scale design of Vector Architects in China, which dialogues with the natural territory and industrial heritage.
In Belgium, the historic Sint-Jozef building, set in the campus of the already famous Melle psychiatric centre, has a continuous debate in the design process involving patients, staff and architects. In Niger, a market designed by Mariam Kamara (Atelier Masomi) with simple coloured metal structures strengthens the sense of community. "Artificial landscape poetry" talks about the beauty of projected nature, with a focus on Art Biotop Botanical Garden, a park rich in water designed by Junya Ishigami in Tochigi, Japan.
Working with local communities, the Cape Town International Public Art Festival uses graffiti as a tool against gentrification, while in London the next Serpentine Pavilion by Junya Ishigami is eagerly awaited. In this issue of Domus, a cataloguing of all the pavilions located in Hyde Park since 2000.
The photo of the month has as protagonist the urbanization in a peripheral area in Namibia taken by the Australian photographer Leah Kennedy.