Milestones Along The Meandering Sojourn (Page 1)

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Milestones are not the destinations in themselves, but rather are two-way pointers to retrace and reflect on the path traversed so far, as well as to re-affirm the course of journey one is to further embark upon. Silver jubilee, since the launch of Architecture+ Design magazine is one such milestone- an opportunity -an excuse to ponder and envision.

Looking back, at the outset, since its inception 25 years ago, Architecture + Design has remained to be one of the few pioneering and creditable architectural journals of India. Credit worthy to be perceived as being honoured to have been featured in the magazine. The team deserves commendation for the same. While, the magazine has had its pendulum of preferences from essays to projects to Writings, What Value as positive constancy, and hope it does not lose, is that it has by far very successfully maintained itself as purely architectural and that too, largely Indian architectural representation. Unlike some of the other journals, it has resisted the temptation of flooding its pages with glossy interiors of the fashion world or to fill up the pages with outlandish projects. With its consistent production duality and restrained commercialism, it has provided a fair platform for sharing architectural outcrops on the Indian landscape. The format of regional 'correspondentship' also perhaps helped in making it more accessible and truly national rather than remaining Delhi Centric.

Any organism remains alive and evolves, when it remains flexible to grow, as well as open-ended to transform. Looking ahead, the journal should endeavour to excel further. There are a few areas Where architectural journals in India can make a difference. Most journals have the preference for projects rather than philosophy. More so, preference vested in finished project with cute images rather than process description and documentation of ideas and explorations. Personalities and creators find preference over their products and creations. Faith is invested more in images rather than ideas. Quantum weighing over the content. It is time we changed these biases. It would be good to see the magazine as platform to generate debate. To share diverse points of view. As there are no textbooks in architectural field and each region needs to evolve its own reference resource, magazines (in India especially) by default become the reference tool and archives to retain all the time rather than remain periodicals worthy of one time glance. They need not remain only informative but educative as well. It would be desirable to have some unbuilt projects presented at idea level with conceptual sketches and explorations to generate discussion.
(Continues...)

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