The November edition of Domus India largely revolves around Jawaharlal Nehru and his sense of ‘discovery’ — discovery as a journey of explorations — exploring the world, its people, its history and locating the self within that world, history, and people. Under Books and Reading, we explore myriad titles: The Velocity of Being edited by Maria Popova & Claudia Bedrick; Letters from a Father to his Daughter by Jawaharlal Nehru; and Nehru’s iconic The Discovery of India, with an introduction by Sunil Khilnani. A photo essay by Mumbai-based lensman Chirodeep Chaudhuri on the exposition titled ‘Discovery of India’ on display at Mumbai’s Nehru Centre is almost a visual, physical  manifestation of Nehru’s eponymous magnum opus, and sets the tone for an inclusive, diverse nation.

Architect, M Kadri’s design for Mumbai’s Nehru Centre — a rich symbolic interpretation in design of India, the country he inherited as the first Prime Minister of a free people, and his own personality.

With a focus on a craft-based approach towards computation and its contribution to support artisans in India, we attempt to explore a solution aiming to establish a methodology which makes complex geometry constructible in the country today, even when access to digital fabrication methods are evolving and expensive. This project was conceptualised by students during a three-week-long course, Digital Crafts: Customised Bricks 1.1, conducted at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University, Ahmedabad in 2016.

The cover of this edition, designed by Parshav Sheth, a recently graduated young architect, brings material culture and objects together. The brick shell pavilion in Ahmedabad is a discovery of ‘India-now’ and ‘India-past ‘— a combination of new technologies and existing skills, and direction for the future without positioning the now and past as antagonists but rather as mutually complementing; superimposed with journeys in a ‘discovery of India’, in a perpetual state of being.