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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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Dancing acts: street as theatre

Humanising infrastructure
Siddharth Chitalia, 2019


Following Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin and Sadat Hasan Manto, I argue that the metaphor of the theatre offers us a fertile  methodological lens to ‘see’ and ‘sense’ the street, as it sets a relational play between the characters, objects and spaces. The interpretational possibilities of the street as a theatre of urban life, move our understanding beyond metaphors that frame its space as a ‘disease’ (congestion, hawking etc.) to be cured through surgery or as a ‘right’ to be asserted over public space on the one hand. And even complements those that frame it as a set  of ‘claims’ that impinge to appropriate public space (economies, religiosities,property etc.), or ‘affordances’ offered by multiple objects (furniture etc.), on the other hand.

The research was conducted on a street along the Borivali railway station of Mumbai. Methods like video recording specifics junctions, walking and shadowing people on the street, conducting unstructured interviews and sketching the observation on site were used. Through which archetype like distributor, hawkers, prostitutes, truckers, drunkards etc. were identified. Questions like what is the purpose of these archetypes in the space? How are they setting up the space?

What feelings and behavioural changes they are generating amongst others? Were used to structure the observations. I advance three arguments through this dissertation. First, through the poem, a summary of my research findings, I argue that the narrative inquiry into a ‘street as theatre’ presents the claims of its characters and their temporal spatiality as a series of non-synchronized, fragmented dancing acts. The affordances provided by objects in these acts do not emerge only as a property of their form but the meanings that the characters lend to the objects. For instance, prostitutes use trucks and public restrooms as a space where they can serve pleasure. Second, as against a problem, I argue that the non-synchronized and fragmented theatre offers a series of multi-perspective points that dismantle the single perspective through which the space of the street is viewed in many of the metaphors discussed. Such a multiplicity of perspectives could offer architects, urban designers, planners, administrators, activists,lawyers and others, vantage points through which innovative interventions could be framed, that better the surfacing of urban life. And third, I argue that the ‘street as theatre’ offers immense potential to architects and artists to playfully explore the reinterpretation of performance art spaces (theatre,gallery) in the contemporary context.

I, therefore, ask: If the ‘street as theatre’ presents temporal spatiality from multiplicity of perspectives, then how can its inversion, the ‘theatre as a street’ be used to re-imagine the architecture of contemporary performance spaces?




Read also under ‘Humanising infrastructure’:

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Humanising infrastructure



Humanising infrastructure
Aakash Bhanushali, 2019
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Food streets, as infrastructure for the city: a study of the Khau Galis of the city

Humanising infrastructure
Hetvi Lapasia, 2019
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Extensions: urban life beneath transit infrastructure


Humanising infrastructure
Keerat Kaur Gill, 2024 
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Infrastructure and altered spatialities: case of Pune metro


Humanising infrastructure
Samiksha Bhagde, 2024
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Infrastructure transformations: impact on river ecology

Humanising infrastructure
Subodh Shelke, 2024  
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