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


Architecture of repose: characteristics and perceptions of open spaces

Publics and Spaces
Rushabh Dedhia, 2019


 Open spaces are an integral part of the city. In the city, almost everyone interacts with some form of open space in their everyday. There are efforts by planning authorities to increase the ratio of open space to people. Whenever some sort of relaxation or leisure time is talked about, it can be easily related to open spaces. In
the intensity of life within the city when stress or anxiety is generated, there is an association with open spaces.

In this research, I try to understand what is the relationship between open space and the users. In what ways people perceive, experience and inhabit different types of open spaces in the city. What are the affordances of different types of open spaces. Whether these open spaces help in releasing stress/ anxiety or do they actually
generate it. I acknowledge the research of psychoanalysts who claim, open spaces help in releasing stress and anxiety with the nature and environment of that space. To understand the generation of anxiety and stress, I refer to Anthony Vidler, Rem Koolhaas and Siegfried Kracauer who talk about how modernity has generated strange spaces that completely disassociate people from them. I hypothesize that, various characteristics of open spaces along with different conditions and factors either generate or relieve stress/ anxiety among the user of that space. This relation also depends upon the association of that space each individual has towards it.

I address the study through narratives and diagrams of eight different types of open spaces and their users in the city of Mumbai. The inference of the thesis states three broad understandings of this relation in open spaces in the form of: environment, regulations and users of the space. It is observed that users prefer natural environment for repose. The city requires open spaces that are qualitative in nature and consider the psychological aspects for users. Appropriation of space depends on the proximity and class orientation of user.

The question it generates for architecture is, can there be a form of open space that offers a multiplicity of programs, scales, intersectionality, class and human engagement to exist in the everyday of the city?




Read also under ‘Publics and Spaces’:

Image 1

Enclosed opens


Publics and Spaces
Akshada Dhamapurkar, 2021
Image 1

Urban grounds


Publics and Spaces
Alisha Jain, 2021
Image 1

Food institutions: spatial and social networks

Publics and Spaces
Chetasvi Patel, 2024
Image 1

Crowds and publics


Publics and Spaces
Gunjan Shah, 2022
Image 1

Spaces of dissent/protest



Publics and Spaces
Maryam Sheikh, 2021
Image 1

Changing publics and the making / emergence of new cultural spaces


Publics and Spaces
Neel Shah, 2022
Image 1

Narratives of public line in Asar Mahal: histories, events and everyday

Publics and Spaces
Nisha Shinde, 2024
Image 1

The architecture of public spaces



Publics and Spaces
Ritu Naik, 2021
Image 1

Aesthetics of erasure



Publics and Spaces
Sakshi Sawant, 2022
Image 1

"open" to "public" spaces in Amravati


Publics and Spaces
Sapna Chopda, 2024
Image 1

Interpretative capacities of builtform


Publics and Spaces
Shachi Shah, 2019
Image 1

Public as assemblage in Sharjah

Publics and Spaces
Tanushree Bhagwat, 2024
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.