Certain ideas need to be allowed to persist, even if there is no evidence of their having any value. The reasons for doing this might not be immediately apparent but they need not be known for this allowance to be given. Ideas need to be allowed to continue on the basis of what they need. If they do not ask for attention, do not ask for money, do not ask for practitioners and do not ask for validation, what is the harm in letting them do what they need to do? Sanctuaries are structures that give such inert desires that do not require much a nestling space. A nestling space only means that a space to develop from a spark to a fire is available. Resources for adding fuel to the fire exist.

But what are the criteria of such an offer of nestling space? The criteria is purely instinctive. When we feel that a desire has yet not become enveloped in a puddle of cynicism, we include it in the sanctuary. Cynicism does not allow a desire to achieve its ends. The desire gets stuck in limbo, not being able to reset and not being able to go ahead and pursue its ends either. This sanctuary does not have only a personal implication for us. It has a wider implication even if you do not care about us or the Museum. We are not saying that culture is infectious so we indirectly and invariably have some influence on the way things will shape up. But we are stating that till the total annihilation of all the sanctuaries that offer nestling spaces is completed, there is no victory for either side. Sanctuaries are detested and their role in fermenting opposition is not easily tolerated.

But this depends on what the nestling space offered is able to trigger. Provided the nestling space is actually able to seed a drastic set of alternatives, it will really end up meaning something. The truth is that there are far fewer resources available for causes that are taking a bet on the future that might never be realised. There is a simple one-to-one correlation between investable futures and liveable realities. If an idea does not have the desperate desire to become investable, then it is an empty symbolic gesture and cannot be taken seriously. Not being take seriously means that there we retain no power and remain a benign entity on the landscape.

Many consider soft architecture to be the software layer of architecture in which reals methods and materials adapt software frameworks that are developed and then the physical forms are developed. But soft architecture has nothing to do with software. It has something to do with the soft layer of our existence. The layer which is programmed by experiences, memories, intuition and narrative. Architecture is equal parts soft and hard architecture. What cannot be dealt with is somewhere a problem of capacity and calibre. Here we examine spaces which have become templates of how they come to be and what their purpose is by being denied their soft dimensions.

Ideally these two should not be distinguished. They are part and parcel of the same experience. There are no clearly demarcated boundaries between hard and soft ways of doing architecture but there are certain variables that are often given up on or are not dealt with because they are too complex and the architect lacks a way of dealing with them.

Journals are regular editions of content that has a changing sequence of relevance for us across time. After every particular interval of time, the points to be made about the issues at hand change and need things to be articulated again. Once we start a thread, it can be woven further by public narratives. The kinds of fibres, the colours and the texture of the thread will surely differ. But these differences only help to construct the pattern in a more renewed fashion. The personal and the public understanding of the pattern get exchanged in some way and the collaboration process is continuous.

The journal is not just a record of a process across time but is also a set of issues that must be thought of together. The editor’s objective is to weave this meshwork of inter-related issues. This meshwork does not exist without the existence of the journal. The creation of an issue acts like a glueing process between the trajectories of the different issues. But what confirms the relevance of the issue at hand in the journal and this glueing together of issues that it does is the conversation it can generate. It has to find novel ways of generating conversation. This does not mean that only the volume of conversations generated is important. The volume generated is significant information but the quality of these conversations is significant too. So if chasing the popularity contest logic is baffling and a strategic way of pursing an intersecting with social media cannot be found, we would like to talk about how focusing on quality can change the format of engagement.

When the content of conversation is more important than the face that you are talking in the first place. When there is a greed to want to know what is said next. This greed is called engagement. The moment the greed is not active anymore, the conversation is over. Conversation is a format of connection and the content of transfer at the same time. And the format effects the content. The personality and the positioning of the individual does effect what and how is possible to communicate through conversation.

This correlation means that the onus of saying some things must be taken on. Some things can be said only by us and we should say them. At least we should agree that we will say them, when we actually say it is open.

A shop is a place where products are displayed. But what if the products are not displayed? What if only a person stands there telling stories about the products that could possibly occupy space on the shelves? Do we want to buy things or do we want to get entangled into the mess of the world and are willing to pay for the privilege? We do not know anything about you but we know that you want to buy yourself back as much as much as we do.

We are in debt and so we do not feel free to do what we want. We doubt every action that we may take. But our future is as important for us as our present is. And we need to free our potential from the crushing weight of our debt also.

The shadow that is cast on this current moment is only going to pass once we awaken and rise into presentness. Once we are fully here, we will make sure that we remain in control of our experience. Once we buy ourselves back, we will awake.

Our shop offers you a way to buy yourselves back by doing away with the need to buy anything at all. Our shop is empty. We haunt the alleys of the shop and talk to whoever is there to listen. Once you agree to pay money for the strange vapour comprised of equal parts story and fragments of a broken dream, you let the ghost out of the proverbial bottle. Our indebtedness disappears the instant an exchange happens. If air will be paid for, then we are millionaires. We have a vast supply of ideas that do not need to be frozen in a plastic form. We channel ephemeral concepts into experiences. Our performance cannot be transacted upon in an absolute fashion. It can be transacted upon only in a piecemeal way, with the value of each piece left unspecified. A customer in our shop does not transact upon the past, but on the richness of the present act. If our performance falters, then the value of the exchange falls. If we are invested, so is our exchange value.

We help our customers get tuned to that which has no parameter in representation. On accessing information that media is not even equipped to transmit, a kind of bending happens. This bending is the synthesis of presence in the midst of only shells.

Our shop cannot do without us. This shop needs us to haunt its alleys in order to be any kind of shop at all. Because the real estate in this shop is finite, the only way that this shop can double-up as a factory is by running a school for reading unstated languages for its potential customers. Learning to decipher the transparent is the sole project here and it is very important. Once the garb of transparency is exposed, the amount of information available to process is likely to be overwhelming.

But then shops turn into factories and factories turn into catalogs.

Selling is an uncomfortable act. Getting friends or casual acquaintances to part with money as an exchange is not just difficult, it is unpleasant. But for those who are not connected to the market, the act of selling is only possible with the immediate and close social network. How is the stranger to be approached? How is access to the stranger even something that can be rationally planned and achieved?

Strangers are the most interesting types of people. The word stranger is a mysterious collective noun that makes it seem that we do not have any common ground with a specific set of people and this is the set of people that we need to connect to and test our ideas on. If a stranger feels something is good, it matters more than if a friend says it is good. The stranger brings in an objective perspective. The stranger will not mind refusing an invitation to spend money on what seems to be a badly formulated idea. Now, if we are talking about ideas, we must make it known that ideas are cheap and we like that. We do not feel that only when ideas are acted upon, they become significant. The fault lies in our capacity to imagine and think in an abstract manner.

Capacity to model abstract ideas increases with out acceptance of our own abstract elements. We are not all here, some of us are only products of our own mental constructs. At least we think we are. The weight we give to our faculties that can ideate, critique and continue the cycles is criminal. Thing is that we are conscious all of our waking time and we get used to the flavour of the voices running in our own head. We start identifying with the voices in our heads as if they are real. We start identifying with the voices and believe that the voice represents our self. But the truth is that if that voice is related to us only as a stranger, we can learn how to connect to others by connecting to ourselves in the same way.

Looking in is looking out. By doing both in a divided and conflicted way, we never find this out. We can embrace strangers by relating to our own strangeness. Our own strangeness has something to do with the essence of doing things without why we are doing them. We are lost and while we are lost, we really need a map. We are the prospective customers for maps but at the same time, the only thing we can offer in exchange is the instruments in our shop that can help you get lost too. When we both accept that we are equally lost, we will be able to know each other.

To sell, one needs to be invisible. No business survives on the recurrent sale to family and friends. Businesses survive and grow because they create markets within which strangers can transact with confidence. For strangers to transact with confidence, value needs to be stable and fixed into the form of the product. And for that products need to develop an intensely tangible form. Value of the product starts and finishes with the form. The form cannot be soft or intangible. It needs to be concrete.

To value anything, one needs to have a conversation. The price of a commodity can be arrived at through conversation. But we do not care about the price. Because once we sell, our conversation is over. We do not want to end it. Besides, we will keep having more to say and would like you to have access to it too. These are things of value for both of us. This is what we want to exchange and so, conversation is our currency. We will only transact through conversations.

To buy, one must be desirous. There must be a desire for change, for a perturbation of the status quo. A desire that drives motivation for the mouth to open and the hand to move towards a device that dispenses currency. All this takes a lot of effort. The seller and the buyer both have desires and motivations, but the anxiety of the approach to the final push off of the cliff-face of the mountain of the transaction must be overcome. This is the difficult part. It involves a leap of faith. Can a push be made as effortlessly as possible? Sure. We only need to find a way. Efficiency is a way. We introduce efficiency into the system by reducing steps. If we take away the step of the hand moving, we have already reduced effort. Now only the mouth has to open.

We have made the determination of value into a game. In this game, we will read each sentence in our book to you and we will ask you if you agree. After we have performed all the sentences to you, we will ask you if you feel like holding on to any sentence, or if any sentence led you experience a new kind of thought. If you think so, we will offer those sentences to you. You may, if you like, in turn play this game with whomever you choose to play with, in order to have another conversation. This is the minimum retail price (mRP). You owe yourself that much at least. If conversation is a currency, it wants to grow and spread like a virus. So, why not go forth and multiply?

What will you, the player, win? You win a sentence you can post on your fridge door or your Facebook wall, you win an insight. You win a memory of a delightful conversation you had with us, and which we guarantee you will have again with whomever you choose to play with. This game will give you victory again and again. Are you game?