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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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Women's claims: stories of domesticities

Selfing in the City
Foram Shah, 2020


The city of Mumbai is densely populated and is a pulse point of religiosity and hope.  In spite of being this dense and compact, every now and then it is able to stretch itself to hold more during these festivals and added events. One such event that occurs annually is the festival of  Ganesh Chaturthi. Every year as the festival draws near, the neighborhoods in the city undergo a rapid flux. These neighborhoods transform into becoming nodes of energy and beliefs. They start attracting attention, people and resources like magnets. The neighborhood starts swelling and stretching and folds layers of systems and negotiations into itself to accommodate this volume. It starts transforming when it is time  to prepare and procure resources for the festival, till it is dismantled and absorbed back into the city. It gestates and holds a whole plethora of energy, hope, rituals, colors, chauvinism, aspirations, desires, power relations and fear all overlapping till it finally gives birth to the grand event. For that period, the lives of the people in and around the neighborhood get re-organized. The community does not sleep. The enthusiasm starts setting in and can be seen in the voluntary compromises, shifts and changes almost unconsciously made by people for the long-awaited event.

Once the event is delivered, the structure, routines and enthusiasms start shrinking, almost rapidly, till it fades to its previous state of being. Resting, till it’s time for it to give birth again.

This thesis documents these phenomenons in an attempt to look at how urban nodes within Mumbai behave during times of added events. It tries to demonstrate how streets and neighborhoods are altered architecturally in order to accommodate the swellings within the city and the changes they induce within public behavior. In addition to this it also documents various layers of negotiations, permissions, etc in the space time continuum of the recurring cycle of Ganesh Chaturthi.To analyze the fold that makes the fabric of the city elastic, the thesis attempts to draw a set of charts, diagrams and maps layering the various folds that place this elastic fabric in time and space.

These readings and data further help understand the ability of urban forms to fold, stretch and be elastic, in an ever-evolving city. It challenges the notion of permanence.It provokes one to think about the city as a complex overlay of non-rigid, non-definitive spatial and logistical systems that are light, temporary, reversible and adaptive to change, leaving no or little trace on ground.




Read also under ‘Urban Elasticities’:

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Urban artifacts


Urban Elasticities
Akshay Savla, 2020
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Hybrid-scrapes: topography of spatial overlappings

Urban Elasticities
Soham Tondwalkar, 2020
To access the Thesis Works, kindly fill the following form with relevant details. 
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