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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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The politics of dwelling

Home: Negotiation, Association and Escape
Ashwin Gupta, 2020


House has been conflated with the idea of home, dwelling and haven, romanticized by the popular media, and institutionalised by the idea of household and family. My experience of the house on the other hand has not validated these ideas. Instead it has articulated the house as a contested place, inhabited through a series of negotiations. These negotiations happen not only in cajoling, jokes, and deception, but also includes disputes, quarrels and silence. Dwelling within any house is thus political, through which one consolidates power..

The thesis argues that the modern imagination of living compartmentalises dwelling into components, contained in a space. It analyses the type of family that the apartment produces, and  therefore tries to nuance this container idea of inhabitation, through the politics of dwelling that the apartment affords.How is power constituted and experienced in a domestic space? How does power and domestic space shape each other?

Through an examination of 8 apartments, occupied by 4 different family types, the thesis maps the intersection of lived geography with the physical cartography of the home. The thesis therefore argues that it is the modern idea of segregation of space that institutionalises domesticity, and produces specific spatial hegemonies. On the other hand, it is the negotiations, i.e. the practice of inhabiting a place, that nuance these hegemonies socially. Given these negotiations, could the apartment be reconceptualised as a perpetually reappropriate-able space?  The thesis thus attempts to unpack home as a field of power and its constant negotiation which in effect, produces its spatial orientation.


Read also under ‘Home: Negotiation, Association and Escape’:


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Highway urbanization: architecture of flux, uncertainty and anticipation

Home: Negotiation, Association and Escape
Asmita Kubade, 2020

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Architecture and power: practices of escape


Home: Negotiation, Association and Escape
Herin Vora, 2020

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