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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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Degrees of exclusivity in educational campuses

Institution and Typology
Helee Doshi, 2021


This thesis explores the varying levels of exclusivity generated spatially in three distinctly designed  educational campuses over the last 150 years in Mumbai. It argues that contemporary educational campuses are exclusive in nature, through their spatial configuration and forms of socio- cultural relations. It records the lived experience of the users in these campuses through conversations, narratives, and readings of the building’s  planning and layout. A campus is perceived as inclusive in nature when it allows for easy access to its spaces, caters to a wide range of user groups, and can hold and build social relations.

The study questions the notions on which the campuses are built in the urban context. The thesis begins to ask: How and why are they designed as inward-looking spaces, with private enclaves and fortress-like conditions of high walls, huge amounts of security, and decreased spaces of interconnectivity with the immediate outside environment?  It attempts to investigate the reasons and consequences of its aspirations to become a  state-of-the-art space, which produces distinct forms of socio-urban life. These questions emerged to me when  I started studying in a reasonably liberal environment like SEA(School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai),  immediately after completing my high school studies from the SVKM’s educational college campus, Mithibai (Chauhan institute of science, Mumbai) which had an extremely controlled environment. A highly exclusive campus space becomes limiting in nature, by controlling its user activities. Its spatial recodings subconsciously discourage social interaction amongst its users.

The research concludes by articulating spatial contributions towards  ‘acts of exclusivity’. This study instigates architects to rethink the ideology on which educational institutions are designed in the urban context. How are these institutions read and experienced today? How do they become exclusive in nature in terms of accessibility and social relations? Thus encourages designing of campus spaces as cordial spaces of knowledge and information rather than insular objects in the city landscape.

Research Question: How  do ‘Degrees of exclusivity’ get produced within architectural and formal conditions of Educational Campuses?



Read also under ‘Institution and Typology’:

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Architecture of Transactions


Institutions and Typology
Akshata Shenoy, 2018
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De-schooling Architecture


Institutions and Typology
Anjali Agrawal, 2021
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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 Chhatterjee, 2019
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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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