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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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Gendered spatiality & the factory

Difference and Urban Space
Bhoomi Bakrania, 2022


How are gendered experiences shaped in a predominant industrial workspace? Although there is a rhetoric of gendered equality in workspaces, their spatiality produces non-neutral or unequal gendered experiences. In this thesis, I define gendered spatial experience as the structure of feelings and behaviour that are produced in a gendered body by the intersection of everyday routine, occupation of space and its spatial configuration. These intersections, in a male dominated work space, often lend themselves to the production of the male gaze, thereby making the occupation of space comfortable or uncomfortable for women. The ways in which women negotiate and claim spaces in such spatial configurations could have significant learnings to offer for the design field.   

The interest regarding this thesis comes from my observations during the time I spent working as an architectural intern in an office that was located in an industrial landscape in a second city of an industrialised state in west India. This second city has its primary economy as industries where men and women migrate for jobs and work. In the selected factory, a fordist process of manufacturing with a hierarchy of positions produces goods from paper. A semi-structured interview with eight women and six men that focused on socio-economic profiles, daily routines, opinions and perceptions of the factory space formed the basis to understand the gendered spatial experience of the factory space. Alongside, visual and participant observation helped me map the spatial affordances of each of the factory spaces.

My study advances four arguments. First, the fordist assembly line of the factory lends to a typological spatial organisation of the shed where manufacturing programmes are located at the centre whereas industrial services and packaging programmes are located at the periphery of the factory space. Second, male labour is employed in the production unit and labour intensive activities which are located in the centre of the factory whereas female labour is employed in less labour intensive activities of administration and cleaning such as clerks, receptionists, packing and sanitary work which are located at the periphery of the factory. Third, this division of labour and its location in the factory space sets up the space for men to command the view of open spaces and the hollow shed with their “gaze.” And fourth, women feel uncomfortable in large spaces where they are vulnerable to more gaze. They find comfort in spaces which veil this gaze. They claim spaces in-between large paper rolls in the packaging unit or piles of files in the old office and negotiate by mobilising fraternities of friendships, by moving through gaze together.




Read also under ‘ Difference and Urban Space ’:

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Cast(e) in space


Difference and Urban Space
Adwait Desai, 2021
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Class and leisure


Difference and Urban Space
Aman Nahar, 2021
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Zulm as everyday: spaces of oppression in Srinagar

Difference and Urban Space
Ankit Sharma, 2021
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Unscripting the home: women making space in the city

Difference and Urban Space
Ankita Dhal, 2019
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Spatiality of segregation: planning of upper-class homes


Difference and Urban Space
Nitisha Parakh, 2022
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Class and housing aspiration



Difference and Urban Space
Sagar Gurav, 2019
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Gendering in public spaces: a look into how women perceive, navigate and occupy spaces

Difference and Urban Space
Shivani Dave, 2019
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Contested urbans: between settling & resolution

Difference and Urban Space
Stuti Shah, 2021
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