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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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Urban artifacts

Urban Elasticities
Akshay Savla, 2020


Aldo Rossi in his book “Architecture of the City”  talks about the City as an artifact, which is in turn made up of many smaller  urban artifacts. Urban Artifacts work as a primary element, which acts as a catalyst in development and growth of the city. These artifacts are not only the built environment but also constitute  the empty voids, where cultural practices create the everyday of the city. The spaces where the urban artifacts and society produces interactions are the lived space. Lefebrve in the ‘Production of Space’, talks about  lived space, which is produced largely by society and social dynamics.

As these artifacts are important links to the social dynamics of a place, the aim of the project is to design ‘Urban Artifacts’, which are culturally responsive and not limited to their utilitarian property. This disquisition intends to understand how people use Urban Artifacts to make spaces. The thesis thus investigates what urban artifacts afford so as to find new ways to make spaces amenable and accessible to people.

The field of study being located in Charkop, a western suburb of Mumbai, finds ways in which urban artifacts are appropriated and claimed by city actors. It investigates what architectural features and characteristics allow for these appropriations and what don’t. The thesis makes a case for urban artifacts to be culturally responsive and to be designed as scaffolds for claims and appropriations to take place.




Read also under ‘Urban Elasticities’:

Image 1

Elasti-city: a cartography of space and time


Urban Elasticities
Divya Vaidya, 2020
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Hybrid-scrapes: topography of spatial overlappings

Urban Elasticities
Soham Tondwalkar, 2020
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