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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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Hybrid-scrapes: topography of spatial overlappings

Urban Elasticities
Soham Tondwalkar, 2020


This thesis aims to understand the spatiality of hybridity and the kind of social relationship it produces. In order to do so, I chose to study the neighbourhood of Charkop in the northern suburbs of Mumbai; which was announced as a site and service scheme by the Government during the 1980s.

Unlike insular zoned, vertical societies, which segregate working and living, recreation and regeneration into separate compartments, Charkop’s spatiality emerged quite differently. Here, all boundaries between the above category of activities blend. This happens because of the particular kind of architecture shaped by the people living here producing a distinct hybrid landscape. The hybrid  landscape refers to distinct typology / architecture of the settlement which ties up the interior and exterior activities into a continuum. It forms a continuous landscape that can afford multiple activities. The thesis aims to look closely at the characteristics of this ‘continuous’ landscape and the way in which it produces these affordances.

Methodologically, I am studying the site at three scales: the home, the house cluster and the street junction/ chowk. In each case mapping the built form of neighborhood which allows these multiple activities to perform. The thesis focuses on the way in which one activity seamlessly folds into another, producing a community that sustains on shared spatial resources, close knit relationships and spatial tolerance. These aspects make the urban form of Charkop worth studying where they allow an alternative emerging sense of hardened claims and individualising environment in urban areas like Mumbai. This hybridity allows give and take, constant communication and multiple engagement in the neighbourhood.




Read also under ‘Urban Elasticities’:

Image 1

Urban artifacts


Urban Elasticities
Akshay Savla, 2020
Image 1

Elasti-city: a cartography of space and time


Urban Elasticities
Divya Vaidya, 2020
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