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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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Type and transactions: body and behaviour in market spaces

 Type, Behaviour and Experience
Drishti Desai, 2022


In cities, markets are one of the essential public gathering spaces through which numerous social networks are formed. Visiting a market is a socio-cultural activity in everyday life, where people come together for a variety of transactions. However, the spatial behaviour of the markets has evolved over the years in response to the ever-changing nature of consumerist society.  Traditional markets exist in addition to new forms of marketplaces, ranging from shopping malls to online shopping websites and mobile applications.

The thesis focuses on the architectural type of marketplaces and how transactional relationships are shaped by it. The spatial setting of a market type unconsciously guides an individual's behaviour. With the emergence of newer typologies of markets, the relationship between the human body, commodity and space gets redefined. To delve deeper into this changing relationship and assess what aspects of social life is afforded by a particular type, three different markets are compared. The case studies undertaken for the research are the Dadar market along the Dadar railway station, the Mangaldas market in Kalbadevi, and the Oberoi mall in Goregaon. All these different types of markets have emerged through distinct timeframes and are situated in different contexts. The research methods implemented are visual and participatory observations and semi-structured interviews to engage with the study. Along with that, secondary sources have been used to complement the research.

These cases are analysed for the affordance they provide in terms of movement flows through them, the density of people and goods, the porosity, the edge conditions that lend themselves for claims and negotiations, materiality leading to comfort and discomfort, scales creating intimacies and densities or fragmentation. This analysis points out that the change in type has created a change in transactional relationships and in turn a change in the social behaviour of the public.



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