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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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A Routine of Happiness : The In-Between Realm and the Spaces of respite

 Skins and Thresholds
Yash Vadher, 2018


Cities are made up of people. Cities take more and more number of people into their fold everyday. Wherever one looks, there are people; people who are sometimes squatting, resting, meeting or working. Cities allow for such life forms to happen. The whole city behaves as if it is a home for everyone. Homes are sometimes places for just storing strange objects, sometimes functional and sometimes not. These are spaces where duties are reminded to have the opportunities to go for a joyride.

Duties wear the mask of strange desires that keep the everyday routine going. Cities at the same time allow for each ones desire to take form. Desires of various things, such as taking a particular train, catching up with a friend at 2am, taking that particular route home for hoping one bumps into specific people, maintaining fitness, becoming heath conscious, keeping track of everyone, drinking, using abusive language and many more things. All such absurd desires go on to becoming a part of everyday life.

By doing this, strangers become friends, friends meet new friends, friends become enemies, enemies become family, etc. In this process of jumbling and settling, cities come to terms with themselves, of making space for everyone. In the everyday routine and maneuvering of the city and during their times of respite, one finds that people inhabit spaces that are not claimed. They are often not the designated open spaces or public spaces such as a jogger’s park, garden, malls, and etc. but those that are ‘In-Between’ spaces like pan-shops, chai tapris, train, bus-stops, bars, balconies, terraces, etc. People spend a lot of their free time in such spaces.

The objective of this study is to develop an understanding of the spatiality related to such spaces of respite. This hypothesis alludes to a different model for public spaces beyond the conventional ideas one finds in the development plan, viz. playgrounds, recreational grounds and various other public amenities.

As people move out of the boundaries of their homes and reach their multiple places of work, a large system of commuting network facilitates this activity. Because of this, a distinct urbanity in the form of infrastructures, buildings with mixed-use typologies and spaces in between them emerge. If we look closely at these infrastructures, services and other leftover spaces, then one finds many conditions that allow people in the city to spend their time of respite during their breaks and journeys that gives them life support, energy and happiness.



Read also under ‘Skins and Thresholds’:

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Spatial learnings from cellular phenomenon


Skins and Thresholds
Dhanvi Shah, 2022
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Living in the forest: a study of settlements in and around the edge of the forest

Skins and Thresholds
Divya Bhat, 2019
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Land-water interface: a narrative of the land-water edge along the Godavari River, Nasik

Skins and Thresholds
Gautami Kasat, 2019
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Stories of urban thresholds from Mahad


Skins and Thresholds
Kaushal Vadake, 2018

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Of building skins




Skins and Thresholds
Priya Jalan, 2018
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Life resettled: work, life and leisure in the resettlement colonies alongside the edge of the Deonar dump

Skins and Thresholds
Vibhavari Sarang, 2019
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Spatiality of roughness/softness of streets



Skins and Thresholds
Yash Bhandari, 2022



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