The August edition of Domus India includes a blend of features on art and architecture. In the Books section, we review The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan, a compilation of essays by one of the most widely regarded experts on Mughal art and architecture, Ebba Koch, in collaboration with Ali Anooshahr. The essays invite the reader to delve into a multidisciplinary analysis of Mughal India during the first half of the 17th century, during the reign of Emperor Shah Jahan and his predecessor Jahangir. An essay on modernist architecture especially pertaining to Delhi and Chandigarh raises questions of whether the architecture is adaptive or normative, if it can accommodate the expansions of desires and the accumulation of years, and if it fabricates buildings for people or people for the buildings.

The issue includes in-depth features on two important exhibitions — Connecting Threads: Textiles in Contemporary Practice held at Mumbai’s Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, comprising the works of 17 artists which present textile as both a medium and process; and Negative Space: Trajectories of Sculpture at ZKM | Karlsruhe, Germany, surveying ideas from history as well as the contemporary, to build arguments regarding our notions of perception and reality, reflection and representation, illusions and experience.

Following the release of the book Shaping Cities in an Urban Age (2018) authored by Ricky Burdett — professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age project — this edition of Domus includes an interview with Burdett, highlighting how any argument around sustainability must reintroduce planning as a political and a design discipline, at the heart of architects’ agendas.