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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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Civil War and the inversion of public space in Borella, Colombo 

 Memory and Belonging
Rutu Kelekar, 2018


How did civil war transform the nature of public space in Borella, a neighbourhood on the eastern edge of Colombo? Civil war (1975-2009), I hypothesise, resulted into the inversion of public space in Colombo city, which I define as either a decrease in instances and / or intensities of small and / or large groups of gatherings and social interactions. I have approached the analysis of the inversion of public space qualitatively by focusing on five aspects: physical character, ownership, nature of users, the transformation of space through specific interventions, and the changing associations of users with the space.Through graphic novel narratives, I advance two arguments on the inversion of public space. First, in drawing attention to the spatiality of urban fears, I argue that civil war has led to the inversion of those public spaces where both, the state and the Tamil radicals, eyed a potential to draw widespread regional, national and international attention to their cause. Second, I argue that three broad strategies are deployed in the inversion of public spaces namely, Partial programmatic erasures and alterations, fortifications and policing rules and regulations .In the face of the inversion of public space in Borella through the above strategies, how can architects engage with the reconciliatory processes of ‘rebuilding hearts and minds’? I consider that such a design provocation could be operationalised by asking: How can architects reprogramme Borella’s public spaces to reverse their inversion in the post- civil war context? What kinds of physical strategies could emerge to defortify the architecture of public spaces?



Read also under ‘Memory and Belonging’:


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Spatialities of everyday heritage


Memory and Belonging
Aashika Vijaykar, 2020

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Galalelya jaga ("गाळलेल्या जागा"): overlaps of memory and home

Memory and Belonging
Aditi Bhandari, 2024

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Remembering ghar: continuities of memory

Memory and Belonging
Anika Pugalia, 2024

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Architecture of a monument: Vasai fort

Memory and Belonging
Chinmay Kadwadkar, 2018

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Architecture and memory: remembering home in involuntary dislocation

Memory and Belonging
Dhruv Chavan, 2018

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On Sindhi refugees: making home in Jalgaon


Memory and Belonging
Khushboo Tejwani, 2024

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Retrofitted domesticities


Memory and Belonging
Nikunj Dedhia, 2020

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Spatiality of remembrance: encounters between the native and urban

Memory and Belonging
Tanishqa Rodrigues, 2020

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