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Designed as a comprehensive resource on spatial thinking, experimental pedagogy, and academic practices, this archive serves as a record for reference and critical analysis. 

More than a traditional institutional repository, it is envisioned as an "Archive of Ideas," structured to mirror the conceptual and intellectual framework of SEA. The platform captures specific engagements, explorations, and pedagogical reorientations, expressing the school's distinct set of practices constituted by its students and teachers. 

The collection encompasses intellectual articulations—from course books and objectives to studio briefs and lectures—alongside a  documentation of student work, field studies, and thesis projects. Through this structure, the archive navigates complex inquiries into typologies, ontologies, and genealogies, while exploring themes of environment, urbanisation, futures, and ethics. It serves as a space for rethinking geographies and histories of type, offering the school's co-learning experiments and its ongoing articulation of space and form.


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Architecture and Power

 Institutions and Typology
Archiit Chatterjee, 2018


The thesis investigates the concept of power in architecture, where the work focuses on recognizing architectural methods and techniques that bring about experience of power in space. The work discusses cases of public buildings (in this case , Municipal ward offices) which develop a relationship between spatial configuration and experience of power.

For example, the Asiatic society, Mumbai, was a former Town Hall. Today it functions as a typical library that is configured in such a way that the administrative authorities sit on the dais, where as the durbar hall is configured into different reading spaces divided by the book shelves, and tables respectively. Now, the authority that sits on the dais keeps an eye around the immediate spaces near the dais and creates a sense of anxiety for the user. To counter that, the user group tends to create personal pockets away from the administration’s surveillance. In a space like this, the presence of someone crossing the hall is always felt from the footsteps of people walking over the teak wood floor boarding. This phenomenon creates a sense of indirect awareness of somebody behind you, which blurs the notion of privacy that one feels in those pockets while reading books. Here, it is because of the orientation of the durbar hall and the elevated dais along the axial corridor that creates a sense of unintentional and subconscious play of power/control on to its users.

However, the grand staircase that was once the main entry to the institute, that was meant to create an awe for the colonial institutions and its seat of power, has now adapted itself into a place of leisure and for passers-by to sit and relax, creating a sense of pause from the daily routine. It is the configuration of the durbar hall alongside the elevated dais which is used by the authorities to enact surveillance and control on to its users but also the private pockets inside the hall and leisure activities on the staircases which create a very nuanced play of power dynamics in space. These are ‘techniques’ that the authorities use in order to create a sense of control on the users, at the same time there are responses by the users which form subtle tweaks to the act of controlling. Michel De Certeau speaks of ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ in the “Practice of Everyday Life” where he calls ‘tactics’ the tools of the weak and ‘strategies’ the tools of those in power.
The thesis explores spatial and elemental configurations that play an important role in shaping, manipulating human behaviour. The primary intention of this thesis focuses on the relationship between internal organisation of an institute, its building elements and its everyday social interaction with its users.



Read also under ‘Housing and Typology’:

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Architecture of Transactions


Institutions and Typology
Akshata Shenoy, 2018
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De-schooling Architecture


Institutions and Typology
Anjali Agrawal, 2021
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Urban heritagization: conserving memory of the city

Institutions and Typology
Anjan Kudtarkar, 2021
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Degrees of exclusivity in educational campuses

Institutions and Typology
Helee Doshi, 2021
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Of curricula and learning spaces: Delhi’s learning environments


Institutions and Typology
Manasi Thacker, 2019
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Publicness of research ‘space’



Institutions and Typology
Parth Solanki, 2021
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Architecture of Jain religious institutions


Institutions and Typology
Pooja Temkar, 2019
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Urban temples: synthesis of emerging worship spaces in urban environment

Institutions and Typology
Radhika Rathi, 2019
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Learning ecologies and spatial form: the case of municipal schools in G (S) ward Mumbai


Institutions and Typology
Sandeep Saive, 2018
To access the Thesis Works, kindly fill the following form with relevant details. 
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