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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 power: practices of escape

Home: Negotiation, Association and Escape
Herin Vora, 2020


The Phoolpada neighborhood in Virar, has observed a drastic condition of urban sprawl over the last two decades. It has evolved into a rather inhuman, inhospitable, and unhealthy living environment. The built fabric shaped by different actors has not only disregarded the environmental patterns within the region, but also not provided enough breathing spaces for its people. The nature of the built form in this neighborhood almost bordering this lake is so densely packed that it disrupts certain ecological flows of water, natural light and air. The built form obstructs the downstream of the water to the lake because of which low lying areas are vulnerable to floods during monsoon. This has seriously compromised livability in the area. To relieve themselves from such congestion people devise ways to recreate or release within distinct pockets and corners of the neighborhood, producing new routines that I understand as “practices of escape”.

Engaging with the neighborhood and interviewing people living here was one of the methods. The thesis argues that there are various ways in which people are escaping from that unhealthy environment and inhabiting the neighborhood which I call it escape pockets. The idea of home is extended in new ways of inhabiting and negotiating within the neighborhood that produces new practices and routines. Hence the home is found in various ways of inhabiting these escape pockets which allows escape practice of work, play, leisure, worship, socialize, pause, exchange, interaction, care, refresh, respite and recreation. Hence energizing them every day to maintain or control their mental-physical health.


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


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The politics of dwelling


Home: Negotiation, Association and Escape
Ashwin Gupta, 2020

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Highway urbanization: architecture of flux, uncertainty and anticipation

Home: Negotiation, Association and Escape
Asmita Kubade, 2020

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