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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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(Un)canny city | dérive through Vile Parle

Urban Sensoriums
Pranay Kotadia, 2021


The following work in its root focuses on the mechanics of the Uncanny and how they can be strategized into architectural processes. To define the uncanny, it focuses on the urban experience and its consequences on our subjective nature. What I want to argue is that certain epistemological structures have affected a certain appreciation of the world, which makes us perceive the world and communicate with each other in a certain way. This dominant knowledge structure also has developed our faculties of perception and imagination. These structures help shape our understanding of the world through a complex pattern of conscious and unconscious ideas, feelings, values, preferences, ideologies, and skills.  The Uncanny through its strangeness, anxiety, fear, absurdity, charm, and anonymity provokes us to think outside our epistemes of knowledge, thus liberating us from the dominant structures.

Within the landscape of every day, the architectural uncanny emerges and subverts the preconceived notion and experience of space. What was once linked to one’s epistemes of knowledge is now shaken and being questioned. The architectural uncanny is not a physical setting located in a particular site nor a mere stimulus producing certain emotions. It is the process of recontextualization of one’s intimate relationship with space that brings to light a newer (or perhaps hidden) understanding of it.

The thesis studies the manifestations of the uncanny through flaneur walks or derives through the area of Vile Parle in Mumbai. The dérive a ‘situationist practice’ is a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. In a dérive, a person during a certain period drops their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and lets themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The derive became an important technique since it opened up access to the dark spaces i.e spaces that lie outside the dominant order of circulation (mainly techniques of spatial mapping, territorial mapping, and of invasion and surveillance) and led to many chance encounters with situations which subverted the gaze and created a sense of charm and surprise. The thesis through the trope of the uncanny provides a newer reading of the city and suggests ways in which one can intervene in the [un]canny city.




Read also under ‘Urban Sensoriums’:


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Non-ocular spaces



Urban Sensoriums
Charmi Mehta, 2022

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Sense landscape of an animal in an intense human habitation


Urban Sensoriums
Devarsh Sheth, 2020

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Senses and spatial practice: drawing from other senses


Urban Sensoriums
Gauri Sonar, 2022

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The architecture of shadows



Urban Sensoriums
Himanshi Rathod, 2021

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Understanding spatiality of dream experiences


Urban Sensoriums
Jatan Gala, 2021

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Pet landscapes: spatial awkwardities in human animal interactions

Urban Sensoriums
Paulomi Joshi, 2020

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Mechanics of memory and nine houses through sensorium, atmospheres and type

Urban Sensoriums
Pratik Bharati, 2022

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A stray’s space


Urban Sensoriums
Raunak Rangnekar, 2020

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Sense scape: making sense of human senses in a space

Urban Sensoriums
Vaishnavi Bhartia, 2020

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