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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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Spatialities of everyday heritage

Memory and Belonging
Aashika Vijayakar, 2020


What role does local history play in the production and imagination of space? This question is framed in the backdrop of tendencies of architectural production which either blatantly disregard the role that architecture plays in the collective memory of the city or tend to freeze and preserve historically produced builtform without any regard for the transformation it needs to undergo in the contemporary context.

I engage with this question in Aram Nagar,  a neighbourhood in suburban Mumbai. Aram Nagar, a military transit camp built in 1935 and known earlier as the Kakori Camp, was converted into a refugee camp in the context of India-Pakistan partition. The settlement of Aram Nagar was occupied by refugees from Sindh and West Punjab along with migrants from within the country in the later years. Today, Aram Nagar is transforming into a place where commercial film studio units are setting shop. My dissertation attempts to map the memories of Aram Nagar’s residents of their house, neighbourhood, work and cultural practices. I engaged in deep conversations with residents to develop a thick description of their memories and close visual observation of the builtform based on their memories during my fieldwork. I represented these thick descriptions as spatial vignettes of residents' memories and the form of life that such spatialities hold.

Drawing the representation of these vignettes, my dissertation argues that the memory of home and neighbourhood emerges as a series of thresholds at multiple scales ranging from the house to the neighbourhood. Thresholds, in the memories of Aram Nagar’s residents allowed for observation, dreaming and idling; social interaction from scale of two individuals, a group of individuals and even the entire community for everyday chit chat, celebrations of festivals; setting up livelihood enterprises; as a forest for play and so on. Thresholds thus defined the mental map of memories of Aram Nagar’s everyday life that drew in memories of ancestral homes, dislocation, childhood, work and cultural practices. Discovering these elements led to understanding the engagement of the individuals taking place within the neighbourhood. I, therefore, argue that while much ink has been spent in architectural discourse on discussing the role of building type, paths, nodes, edges, landmarks and districts in shaping the collective memory of cities, Aram Nagar’s residents’ focus on thresholds perhaps draws attention to a new possibility of engaging with collective memory. A focus on thresholds may  allow for interpretative capacities of everyday heritage as against disregarding history or pickling an unaltered archive of built heritage



Read also under ‘Memory and Belonging’:


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Galalelya jaga ("गाळलेल्या जागा"): overlaps of memory and home


Memory and Belonging
Aditi Bhandari, 2024

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Remembering ghar: continuities of memory


Memory and Belonging
Anika Pugalia, 2024

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Architecture of a monument: Vasai fort


Memory and Belonging
Chinmay Kadwadkar, 2018

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Architecture and memory: remembering home in involuntary dislocation

Memory and Belonging
Dhruv Chavan, 2018

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On Sindhi refugees: making home in Jalgaon


Memory and Belonging
Khushboo Tejwani, 2024

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Retrofitted domesticities


Memory and Belonging
Nikunj Dedhia, 2020

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Architecture and healing: civil war inversion of public space Borella, Colombo

Memory and Belonging
Rutu Kelekar, 2018

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Spatiality of remembrance: encounters between the native and urban

Memory and Belonging
Tanishqa Rodrigues, 2020

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