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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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Architecture and memory: practice and selfing of city spaces

Of temporalities
Swaraj Dhuri, 2019


Post 90s, Indian cities have started growing through instances of Urban change. Urban change in the context of this dissertation are resettlement, rehabilitation, renewal and redevelopment cases in the city of Ahmedabad. These changes constantly reshape, repurpose, redevelop and renew the built form and consequently form a gap between the built form and life of the people. This gap creates a dialect of ‘what was’ and ‘what is’ that translates into “An act of remembering”. This act of remembering generates Memories that become mediums through which earlier pre-change city spaces are remembered and narrated.

In Design praxis, the Trope of memory is invoked as Nostalgia for re-creating and renewing the image of the Past. The initial enquiry was set from the gaps between the existing discourse that memory offers in space making acts. The first argument that this dissertation makes is that beyond the act of making and shaping, memory allows people to claim and inhabit certain spaces. Borrowing and building on works of Camillo Sitte, Aldo Rossi and Maurice Halbawachs, I’ve iterated space making acts as three factions: to remember, to make and to self.

Through this mapping of memory, the second argument made is that the spaces of selfing exist either in people’s pre-change landscape and are lost in their post change landscape or reduced in the same. There is an unconscious effort to reproduce the past practices in the new sites of settlement and new conditions of settlement.

The third argument is that remembering and selfing of city spaces happens through spaces that are outside the realm of the planned. These spaces are transitional spaces: in-between spaces, threshold spaces, temporal public spaces and intersections. Selfing happens through first, the projection of certain patterns and pracftices by the character and/or the nature of the space that lends itself for selfing. This study builds an approach that helps bridge the gap between the planned built form and life of people that Urban change fails to address in most cases.




Read also under ‘Of temporalities’:

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Body and space: how does behaviour of a body change the sense of space

Of temporalities
Astrid Fernandes, 2019
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Time, households, and urban transition: stories from Sandor, Vasai 1985-2019

Of temporalities
Aurea Dcruz, 2019
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Hurried-ness



Of temporalities
Devesh Uniyal, 2019
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Mechanics of appropriation: government housing quarters


Of temporalities
Megha Jhawar, 2019
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Story space

Of temporalities
Ria Das, 2019

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