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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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In-distinct boundaries: a compilation of urban relationships with water edges

Frontiers
Ruchi Dixit, 2020


What are the different configurations of space along the river edge and what relationship it produces?

Metropolitan cities are constantly affected by the mutations and fluctuations of urbanization.Rivers, being a mediator between the cities and its hinterlands, have always shared an intimate relationship with each other. These relationships have interrelated and shaped each other in multiple ways. As an individual being born and raised near one such river in the Mumbai city i.e the Dahisar River, a change in the relationship with the river and its edge was constantly felt. Under the various “Beautification and rejuvenating of Dahisar river schemes” that came over years, the proposals of the waterfront were always imagined as them being a leisure commodity. These schemes were basically developed to boost tourism with major clearance of houses,tabelas and existing landscape along the river edge. Similar such clearances and rejuvenation projects were also undertaken along the Sabarmati Riverfront, Godavari Riverfront, Patna Riverfront where the waterfronts were developed as a new public realm connecting the city’s urban fabrics. So with the curiosity of understanding the relationship between the form the edge and the life that happens in the adjacent land, this thesis works with an objective of compiling various spatial configurations and therefore life that has emerged historically along the Dahisar waterfront.

As my theoretical framework I have referred to three works. Soak- Mumbai in an estuary by Anuradha Mathur and DIlip da Cunha which opens up the Idea of Wetness, J.GIbson’s theory for the Idea of Affordance in relation to form and function and Elic and Roland’s theory of affordance for Idea of Behaviour. Drawing out from my field I look upon three different water edges transects through five instances of change, comparing them over the timeline of hundred years. To strategize the methodology I work upon the act of architectural storytelling in a form of sectional narrative scroll, for which I refer to the Chinese Landscape Drawings where they capture the essence or spirit of the space. Through the narrative scroll and sections I further analyse the conclusions for this thesis.

There is a relationship with the economy and social life where the agrarian society affords their livelihood along the soft edge, the industrial sector along the hard edge and finally in case of settlement based sectors as a place for comfort. The research helps to understand that there are constant fluctuations of the land use patterns and their relationships along the edge. From being  an active part of an agrarian economy to a backyard and finally as a space of leisure, the water edge adapts multiple imaginations.The attempt of developing water edges through a singular imagination not only transforms the fuzzy nature of the edge but also fragments multiple affordances of the edge. Thus the thesis aims to develop spatial configurations of water edges that can accommodate multiple imaginations of the waterfront.



Read also under ‘Frontiers’:


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Urban farming

Frontiers
Dimple Mistry, 2020

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An urban frontier: coexistence of contradictions

Frontiers
Sai Kelkar, 2020

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