2020_Paulomi Joshi — SEA Archives

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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.

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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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Sense landscape of an animal in an intense human habitation

Urban Sensoriums
Devarsh Sheth, 2020

Over time, as human-animal interactions have emerged, changed, and evolved, the animal has become an ingrained part of the city. From stray and domestic to house-pets, these animals engage with the urban fabric at various levels. Out of these, the pet has become an emotional commodity and companion or an object of pleasure, and hence a common occurrence. This has brought about shared spatialities within the built environment. The animal understands these shared spaces, on one hand, by their perceptions and on the other through the ever-present control exerted by the humans. This research tries to explore the pet-human bonds and a pet’s inhabitation of the shared spaces emerging from these bonds. It aims to understand the spatiality that is constructed for an animal, particularly dogs, in an intensely domestic human space.

The study is conducted parallelly in two parts, readings and secondary research, and field study. The readings explored are about animal psychology, physiology, sensibilities, etc, to build an analytical framework for the field study. Reading from the works of people like Alexandra Horowitz, Per Jensen, Konrad Lorenz, Jacob Von Uxkull, Franz Kafka, Natsumi Soseki, among others, identification of the parameters governing the animal in domestic spaces is achieved. These parameters bring forth the idea of the ‘Sensorium’, which becomes the basis for the field study. The method followed by the fieldwork is first - identification of the three cases, and then further building a structure to analyze these cases. Based on the parameters identified through the readings and the observations, the drawings work as analytical tools to map the occupation of the space by pet dogs, by plotting the sensescapes and certain parameters that input into them.

The difference in the perception of the dog and the human means that the space affords different opportunities and possibilities to each. Depending on this, and the underlying level of comfort and emotion, space either becomes a ‘place of rest, play, hiding, exploration, escape’ etc, with different characteristics for each. Depending on the need, space is constructed in different forms. Based on these findings, spaces can be rethought of through these parameters. The approach to design can change from visual and human-centric to a more multi-specie friendly, multi-sensory approach.

Read also under ‘Urban Sensoriums’:

Non-ocular spaces

Urban Sensoriums
Charmi Mehta, 2022

Sense landscape of an animal in an intense human habitation

Urban Sensoriums
Devarsh Sheth, 2020

Senses and spatial practice: drawing from other senses

Urban Sensoriums
Gauri Sonar, 2022

The architecture of shadows

Urban Sensoriums
Himanshi Rathod, 2021

Understanding spatiality of dream experiences

Urban Sensoriums
Jatan Gala, 2021

(Un)canny city | dérive through Vile Parle

Urban Sensoriums
Pranay Kotadia, 2021

Mechanics of memory and nine houses through sensorium, atmospheres and type

Urban Sensoriums
Pratik Bharati, 2022

A stray’s space

Urban Sensoriums
Raunak Rangnekar, 2020

Sense scape: making sense of human senses in a space

Urban Sensoriums
Vaishnavi Bhartia, 2020

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