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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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De-schooling architecture

Institution and Typology
Anjali Agrawal, 2021


The thesis argues that most schools are becoming places of disciplining bodies more than of learning and growth. They have not been designed keeping in mind the psycho-social dimensions of space and its impact on the occupants. This concern comes specifically from observing schools in Mumbai which are designed through generic types and standardized configurations of classrooms, labs and primary functional zones (like a library, auditorium/multipurpose etc) with nearly no difference in spatial qualities. The method of research has been through conducting unstructured conversations with students and alumni. The observations of the psycho-social dimensions of the school are then compiled through a wordless graphic novel that is able to hold the nuances of power dynamics, spatial configurations, phenomenological properties of space etc. The schools seen at the macro level do not respond to its site context and are disciplined to a generic type. Disciplining happens through power hierarchies created by organisational configurations, circulation, and movement patterns, scales and proportions of spaces, material and spatial qualities etc. The thesis finds that though the schools are designed through standardised systems for disciplining bodies, students then themselves through their tactics configure spaces where other forms of learning and solidarities happen. Personalizing their desks, occupying furniture in unintended ways, interacting through gestures or chits below benches,, occupying windows, staircases for intimate conversations , hiding behind the buses, disrupting disciplined movement in corridors and staircases through pauses and diverse actions  etc are various ways in which these  ruptures happen. Every individual may possess different learning abilities. However, all are put together in a mechanized system and made to learn in the same patterns.  If schools are becoming places of discipline and suppression rather than learning and growth, the question then arises how can design spatially diffuse the power structures and learn from tactics in which students reconfigure spaces to create more conducive places for learning and growth?



Read also under ‘Institution and Typology’:


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Architecture of Transactions


Institutions and Typology
Akshata Shenoy, 2018

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Urban heritagization: conserving memory of the city

Institutions and Typology
Anjan Kudtarkar, 2021

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Architecture and power: a case in public buildings

Institutions and Typology
Archiit Chatterjee, 2018

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Degrees of exclusivity in educational campuses

Institutions and Typology
Helee Doshi, 2021

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Of curricula and learning spaces: Delhi’s learning environments

Institutions and Typology
Manasi Thacker, 2019

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Publicness of research ‘space’


Institutions and Typology
Parth Solanki, 2021

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Architecture of Jain religious institutions

Institutions and Typology
Pooja Temkar, 2019

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Urban temples: synthesis of emerging worship spaces in urban environment

Institutions and Typology
Radhika Rathi, 2019

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Learning ecologies and spatial form: the case of municipal schools in G (S) ward Mumbai

Institutions and Typology
Sandeep Saive, 2018

To access the Thesis Works, kindly fill the following form with relevant details. 
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