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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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Urban temples: synthesis of emerging worship spaces in urban environment

Institution and Typology
Radhika Rathi, 2019


This aim of this thesis is to understand architecture of ‘worship spaces’, generating in the dense urban environment. The academia emphasizes on formal structure and romanticizes values of light, scale, symmetry, order and other such attributes of worship spaces. These understanding is extracted from academic studies of traditional spaces of worship in India.

Urban temples part away from such ideals and become part of our everyday life by morphing into the economic, social and physical character of any given site. It Produces unique, collaged, reshaped heterotopic spaces. This challenges our conventional associations, beliefs with ritualistic spaces, otherwise created by several religious practices. Rather, urban temples represent an uncanny mixture of revised rituals for worship for the contemporary city in their material form.

The aim of the study is to analyze how urban temples exist amidst our everyday life within the city and the nature by which the resultant space is generated. Its adaptability and the active hybridization of programs, allows everyday programs like medical shop, dance class, street hawkers, newspaper reading stand becoming part of it. The thesis considers five conditions within the city of Mumbai, wherein specific temple types emerge in response to distinct urban forces.

‘Urban Temples’ sparked my interest as they display how collaged, multi-layered and heterotopic the religious practices in our contemporary city are. They reveal the current understanding of everyday worship in our city. This study tries to open up the imagination of everyday ‘other spaces’, with the help of these urban temples. How these urban temple reshape according to the needs of people and physical constraints. It helps us to understand how religion becomes important instrument for curation of space and produces distinct built typologies within the city.



Read also under ‘Institution 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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Architecture and power: a case in public buildings

Institutions and Typology
Archiit Chhatterjee, 2019
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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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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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