2019_Prachi Kasodia — SEA Archives

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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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Of institutions of discipline

Power and Play
Prachi Kosadia, 2019

What is the spatiality of institutions that tends to discipline the mind and control the behaviour of people?

Disciplining of the mind and hence the behavior is a strategy of power used to maintain social order within the city. The city often sets up different kind of organizations in order to condition the minds of people under the name of institutions for the welfare of the people. Institutionalization is a process in which a certain pattern of behavior is set within an organization or community. Understanding the spatiality of these institutions- Erving Goffman in his article Characteristics of Tota Institutions, mentions different kinds of total institutions. Taking that as a basis I have selected six institutions as cases in different parts of Mumbai to examine for ways in which they exert power. This is done through an understanding of typology, accessibility, scale, circulation/ movement, programmatic organization, hierarchical organization, surveillance, light and ventilation in each of the cases.

De Certeau in his book The Practice of Everyday life mentions that, “A tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power.” These tactics become resistances to the power which helps one escape the discipline for some time. Using this operative concept, the thesis examines how people in these various institutions escape the clutches of power. The thesis argues that tactics used to subvert power could be used as a design strategy to diffuse power in these institutions.

As a test case, the next stage of the thesis would take up the Government mental hospital in Thane. Currently some of the older wards are being demolished and newer wards are made to take in more inmates. So re-designing some of the wards which could be used as models to develop other wards in the campus.

Gateways of fear

Power and Play
Jash Gohil, 2019

Tracing play: across educational campuses

Power and Play
Nirmohi Kathrecha, 2019

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