SEA  
ARCHIVES  

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.


+ CORE COURSES
+ CULTURE STUDIES

+ CHOICE COURSES
+ SETTLEMENT STUDIES


Spatiality of publicness and new media

Mediatized Environments
Tanvi Savla, 2020


A personal experience of instances like not allowing the access to a free-entry public place due to the appearance of a person, some places like streets which are too claimed and declared as no-hawking zones and sometimes personally being so engrossed in social media while outside, that there has been a complete re-purpose of the use of public spaces, made me think about it.

In our everyday life, “Public” plays an important role. From the road we walk on to parks we visit, everything comes under the idea of public space. We see various public places emerging over the period of time such as malls, parks, shopping centres, food hubs etc. for people to use and occupy in multiple forms. These spaces are usually built with the perspective of becoming a means of leisure. People are allowed to use these without any monetary investments, or sometimes with a very low maintenance fee. But these new public places are very restrictive to the type of users. Only specific forms of people become active users of these spaces.

Thus, the idea of public produces both, the interventions of anti-public and formation of a new public and that is where ‘Architecture’ becomes instrumental. In the current times, the advent of new media in our daily lives has changed our perspectives of looking at and perceiving the physicality of  these varied forms of public spaces. There is a hijack or a loss of experience of these public spaces due to the dematerialization that has occurred on account of excess usage of internet driven media. Thus the thesis intends to understand these changes in experiences and routines with the coming up of new media and its subsequent dematerialization. What happens to life (routines, physical experiences, transactions, community formation, relationships, etc.) when spatiality of public space transforms on account of new media?

Thesis aims to look at following concepts of
  1. Public and public spaces
  2. New Media
  3. Publicness of media

The method that I employ to draw is that of collage / montage of spatial/temporal collapse using associated images with short annotations. Terms such as peripheral vision and involuntary senses become the driving force in the making of the drawing. New media with its benefits brings in a heightened experience of anxiety that makes our senses disoriented as the surroundings are blurred. Thus, a clear understanding may not be developed and hence generating a stimulus in our minds.

To conclude, new media has made the experience of public space simultaneous. We are in a physical space, but we also inhabit a virtual space simultaneously. The simultaneity that we experience dematerializes the experience of a particular space. The closed boundaries of a public space have thus become an infinite canvas to be explored. Neither the public space nor its edges are fixed. There is a constant reproduction of the experiences when one person enjoys a place physically and shares it to others through various internet driven devices. When multiple people can virtually be there at the same time, the need and form of physical space diminishes.



Read also under ‘Mediatized Environments’:

Image 1

Spatiality in the age of social media


Mediatized Environments
Abhilasha Patil, 2021
Image 1

Devicing home: from aji sunte ho to alexa

Mediatized Environments
Aditya Verma, 2020
Image 1

Technosocieties: in the early second millenium

Mediatized Environments
Dannah Desouza, 2019
Image 1

Screened spaces


Mediatized Environments
Eshan Pradhan, 2019
Image 1

“switch”ed city: architecture of mediatise sensory hardware

Mediatized Environments
Kalpita Salvi, 2020
Image 1

When is digital in space?


Mediatized Environments
Ronak Soni, 2021
Image 1

Morphed households as an impact of the digital

Mediatized Environments
Vikram Veeravalli, 2021
To access the Thesis Works, kindly fill the following form with relevant details. 
SEA Archives 2014© by the School of Environment and Architecture is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.