Dayanita Singh in Ahmedabad

In the Beginning: Kamala House 

Apartamento’s fascination with Kamala House first took shape as an eponymous book in 2019, the third volume in a series devoted to our favourite architects and the houses they built for themselves. Featuring original photography by Quentin de Briey and Mr Doshi’s own archival imagery, Kamala House opened up the home with texts by the architect, as well as multidisciplinary artist Durga Chew-Bose. Durga understood the home as ‘a testament to design that discloses instead of withholding, that is regenerative because, like Doshi, it is a home open to inquiry’. 

Mr Doshi was first featured in Apartamento Magazine issue #22, interviewed by Komal Sharma and photographed by Bikramjit Bose in his beloved Kamala House—the very year he became the first Indian architect to receive the prestigious Pritzker Prize. ‘But really, the idea is to create the sense of an infinite space. Think of it like a core and a periphery that keeps on expanding’, he shared about conceptualising the house. ‘We live, we rejoice, we all feel ownership of this place’. 

Captivated not only by the beauty of his architectural creations but also by his more intimate artistic practices, we published ‘A world of imagination: drawings by BV Doshi’ where the architect Khushnu Panthaki Hoof, Mr Doshi’s granddaughter, explains his visual artwork as a space where ‘childlike fascination, curiosity, and wonder take over, and logic has no meaning’. That spirit carried into her deeply personal tribute after his passing in early 2023, ‘In memory of Balkrishna Doshi’, in Apartamento magazine issue #31. That same issue featured ‘Dayanita Singh’, interviewed by contributing editor Zico Judge alongside never-before-seen photographs taken by Dayanita herself. Following their conversation, ‘An offset artist—Dayanita Singh’ offered a dedication to her career as a photo artist and bookmaker, highlighting the striking configurations and rhythms of her storytelling through books.

Ahmedabad’s sign painters

On the way to the Kanoria Centre for Arts, Robbie stopped by the open-air roadside studio of a group of Indian sign painters. He asked them if they could design a series of posters for the book launch in both Gujarati and English. In no time, a spontaneous design studio was at work, with each typographer interpreting the book, and even the Apartamento logo, with unique flair. Definitely one of the highlights of Robbie’s trip (according to Robbie).

The book’s return home 

The following day, Khushnu welcomed us into Kamala House for a private ceremony with Dayanita. There, in the very spaces BV designed to cradle his own family, we offered the book in a symbolic presentation to him—in reverence, in admiration, and in recognition of the temple he built, not just of light, but of family. Kamala House is a home shaped by a distinct physical reality—a helix of stillness, languor, and repose. It was an honour to launch the book within its walls, a culmination of a story we have been in awe of and privileged to take part in telling.