SEA  
ARCHIVES  

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.


+ CORE COURSES
+ CULTURE STUDIES

+ CHOICE COURSES
+ SETTLEMENT STUDIES


The space of detail

Material and Phenomenon
Gaurav Edwankar, 2019


In architecture, detail is looked at as a simple junction where two or more materials meet, a junction where there is a material separation, a point that breaks continuity and an element that can make the whole built vulnerable if not taken care of. The aesthetic of a design is considered as the experience driving elements of a space. There is a need to understand the complexity, detail plays in an architectural form. To explore this understanding of how detail is the primary contributor to the experience of space and a small part in relation to a larger whole. The research is placed itself in the context where detail is looked through the lens of technique, function, expression and tactile experience.

This dissertation is a research on understanding how architectural details shape the experience of a space. Articulation of elements, how they come together to form a component and the assemblage of these components creates details. Materiality and functionality contribute to the tactile and tectonic experience of space. Changing the elements of a component that governs a detail, potentially changes the spatial experience of built architecture for those who occupy it.The research aims to grab attention to how details get generated and how they help breakdown architecture and its spatial experiences. The obiective of the research is to understand how details help in shaping the spatial experience of a space and to achieve this objective, libraries were taken as the case. The idea is to compare a set of libraries which are situated at places which are different in culture, history, geography, and economy. These parameters don't change the program but change the architecture of the program. The cases chosen for the exploration were Maya Somaya Library of Sharda School situated at Kopargaon, Maharashtra, Lilavati Lalbhai Library, CEPT University Ahmedabad, Gujarat, Auroville Library Auroville, Tamil Nadu, Madras Literary Society Library Chennai, Tamil Nadu and Connemara Public Library Chennai Tamil Nadu. Through these cases, I establish a relationship between details and the spatial experience that is created by them.

What I observe in all the explorations in terms of functionality, the way in which the details of all of these buildings have been thought about are through fixity and permeance. Flexibility has been explored very little in terms of details and whatever it has been explored is a very limited scope. There is a programmatic context to the library that requires flexibility with respect to structure, lighting, ventilation, and program.

Therefore, my design question is how can details contribute to the architecture of flexibility in a public library building.




Read also under ‘Material and Phenomenon’:

Image 1

Architecture of shaded spaces

Material and Phenomenon
Dirgh Kadakia, 2019
Image 1

Material compositions

Material and Phenomenon
Radha Iyer, 2019  
To access the Thesis Works, kindly fill the following form with relevant details. 
SEA Archives 2014© by the School of Environment and Architecture is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.