Domus has appointed Bjarke Ingels as guest editor for 2025, alongside BIG associate Shane Dalke as deputy guest editor and partners Giulia Frittoli and Filippo Cartapani on the editorial team. With Bjarke Ingels at the helm, the ’10 x 10 x 10′ project is now in its eighth round and is gradually approaching Domus’ centenary, which will be celebrated in 2028. According to Domus, the world’s ever new and increasingly complex challenges are becoming more paradoxical, which is why Bjarke Ingels has been chosen as the next guest editor. Described as “sophisticated, forward-looking and globally ambitious”, his vision is post-ideological, post-modern and imaginative, with an approach that combines tradition and subversion.

The team around Bjarke Ingels will publish ten issues on the theme of ‘Materialism’, taking readers on a ‘material odyssey’ that explores the profound role of materials in shaping architecture and design. Each issue will focus on a different material, exploring how architects and designers engage with matter to create life-sustaining objects and environments. “By reclaiming the concept of materialism from the realm of empty consumption,” says BIG’s founder and creative director, “we want to bring it back into the practice of shaping our future through form and matter. We want to embark on an odyssey through the material world. From solid rock to the flow of electrons: stone, earth, concrete, metal, glass, wood, fabric, plastic, plant, resource, immaterial”.

“Life,” writes Bjarke Ingels in his manifesto for his role as guest editor, “is animated matter. Life on Earth adapted to our material environment “until we discovered tools, technology and architecture. Then we gained the ability to adapt our material environment to life”. As the naming of epochs in human history – Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age – shows, “our ability to deal with matter may be the greatest driving force behind the development of our culture”. The focus on matter allows “radically different worldviews to manifest side by side, without distinction or discrimination”. An “editorial oxymoron”, Ingels explains, the materialist manifesto seeks to give voice to seemingly opposing perspectives through the possibilities of each material. Thus, in the pages of Domus, readers will encounter traditionalists and avant-gardists, artisans and technophiles, ornament and austerity, expressive and tektonic, global and local, pragmatists and utopians: “Contradictory ideas united by matter”.

Bjarke Ingels joins Domus’ list of guest editors, which includes renowned architects such as Michele De Lucchi, Winy Maas, David Chipperfield, Tadao Ando, Jean Nouvel, Steven Holl and Toshiko Mori, as well as Norman Foster. The first issue curated by Bjarke will be published in January 2025.