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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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Spaces of interplay: between the planned and the lived in housing environments

Housing and Living
Saniya Ranade, 2019


The city of Mumbai is a vast landscape of various housing typologies. I have experienced living in a chawl and an apartment. Being a part of both, I was able to notice differences in behavioral patterns of people. The same set of people would behave differently; their body language and actions would differ too after moving to the apartment. I wasn’t able to grasp what exactly was happening. If the people are the same then what is changing? It led me to the realization that there was something the space itself was doing which was causing these changes. This aroused my interest in understanding how space lets certain things happen or triggers certain movements, behaviors and activities.

Following up on that experience, this thesis aims at understanding spaces of housing and delves into the muddle of what it is that the space itself is doing.

Through the field studies of a wadi, a singly loaded chawl, a doubly-loaded chawl and an apartment which are the formal housing typologies in Mumbai, the thesis argues that the configuration of architectural elements affects the affordance of those elements. Affordance here, through the readings of Gibson, is defined as something that the space offers the animal i.e. what the space can let you do in it. The thesis further introduces the idea of interplay as the effect two spaces tend to have on each other and examines whether the various spaces i.e. unit, corridor, open space, staircase and boundary of the site engage in an interplay with other spaces or not and how that affects the affordance of those spaces. Spaces of high interplay, the thesis concludes, are observed to be generating a new way of life and new programs.

Hence affordance and interplay act as tools to bridge the gap between the planned and lived. The thesis further argues that the concepts of affordance and interplay can be used to shift the prevalent discussion in the context of housing in India, from standards and affordability, to the discussions on lived experience of space.




Read also under ‘Housing and Living’:

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Housing, efficiency and equity



Housing and Living
Akash Vishwakarma, 2019
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Co-operative redevelopments



Housing and Living
Chinmay Gawade, 2019
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Spaces of interplay: between the planned and the lived in housing environments

Housing and Living
Saniya Ranade, 2019
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Handmade urbanism: the case of Eksar


Housing and Living
Vinisha Kuckian, 2019  
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