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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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Religious festivals, post-event spatialities and everyday life: Kumbh mela and the Simhastha camp

Narratives of Everyday
Shubh Sankhla, 2022


What spatial opportunities do intense religious festival event spaces create during non-event times? At stake in this question lies the challenge to interrogate the celebratory narratives of temporal / ephemeral / pop-up architecture / kinetic city that have emerged from architectural research on religious festival event spaces in India, on the one hand, and to articulate conceptual tropes beyond those of “death” and “unproductiveness” to describe their post-event spatialities, on the other hand.  

The field for this study is the land reserved in the Development Plan of Nashik city for the Simhastha Camp, literally a space where sadhus camp for six months during the Kumbh mela. It is a designated space for living and celebrating cultural / religious practices that unfold during the Kumbh mela. Much of the land falls under private property ownership but it is regulated by the state through the Development Plan and Development Control Regulations (DCRs) that do not allow for the construction of new permanent structures, and through the provision of infrastructure like  water supply, sewerage, roads and other essential infrastructure.

Of the numerous programs that exist within this camp space, I have chosen to study houses, nurseries, scrapyards, suppliers of festival and marriage decorations, and a street. The methods for each case differ as interest is on the transformation of builtform : the scrapyard and decorator supplier have a similar type, hence they are studied through affordance of their type, the house is studied by comparing its form of life during and after the event through a timeline where extensions of the houses create different spatial experiences, the nursery is looked at how the land politics shapes the builtform to hide their house by building a shed over their house, and how the office and shops, operate with the same type of shed, lastly the streets are studied through how the residue of the event produces different spatialities where the city appropriate this residue to create new economies and leisure spaces. My analysis produces a biographic narrative of the Simhastha Camp through thick annotations of the transformations of the urban form and built form by organising them in a linear post-event timeline punctuated by the cosmological cycle of the religious festival event. The thick annotations are meant to develop a narrative of the land politics by focusing on the transformations in property rights (ownership / tenure), activities (post/event), land claims, negotiations with development control regulations, aspirations of the owners, and the spatial opportunities and affordances that these spaces produce.

I advance five arguments through this thesis.

First, since the development control regulations do not allow for any permanent structures to be constructed in the designated Simhastha Camp precinct,  owners, who initially were farmers, have been compelled to rent their property for the activities of the new service economy that provides opportunities for income generation. This transformation is also produced due to the fact that projects of infrastructure provisioning for the Kumbh mela on private property often reduce the fertility of the land.

Second, in the change from an agrarian to an urban services based economy, the builtform response to the DCRs has led to a widespread proliferation of ‘the shed’ as a new building typology on the land reserved for Simhastha Camp.

Third, the shed typology tactically responds to the aspects of temporariness and permanence. Its materiality and tectonics make it appear like a temporary structure that follows the DCRs but beneath its skin, it lends to the everyday consolidation of houses, work and life. For instance, the house expands using the shed; the labour house in the nursery hides by building a shed over a pakka house; the office and shop in the nursery also expands using the shed; the streets are claimed by makeshift tapris and mobile shops. This doubleness - the tectonics of the temporary and the consolidation of life - could offer significant learnings for architectural thought as against the celebratory ideas of temporal / ephemeral / pop-up architecture / kinetic city, which picture a builtform that emerges during the event, and then dismantles and vanishes.

Fourth, in moving beyond the concepts of the temporal / ephemeral / pop-up architecture / kinetic city, doubleness draws attention to the analogies of the ‘veil’ and the ‘residue’ as tactics to consolidate builtform and life in the  post event spatialities.

And fifth, my research makes a methodological contribution by pointing to the lacunae in studying the architecture and urbanism of religious event spaces in opposition to the everyday. It draws attention to the difference that a long duree, longitudinal study could make in developing thick descriptions of the ways in which the event folds into the everyday.


Read also under ‘Mobility and Publics’:


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The spatiality of urban mobilities


Mobility and Publics
Abhinav Pahade, 2020

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Highway urbanization: architecture of flux, uncertainty and anticipation

Mobility and Publics
Ankita Teli, 2020

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Street affordance: a case in Amravati

Mobility and Publics
Arnav Mundhada, 2022

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The politics of commons


Mobility and Publics
Ashi Chordia, 2020

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Upgrading roads: transforming edge affordances

Mobility and Publics
Bharvi Shetye, 2022

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City undone: fragmenting the narrative

Mobility and Publics
Maitreyee Rele, 2020

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Highway urbanization in Chiplun


Mobility and Publics
Ninad Thatte, 2022

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Suburban streets: claims and affordances

Mobility and Publics
Riddhi Shah, 2022

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(Inter-)active spaces


Mobility and Publics
Saloni Vora, 2020

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From the streets: behaviour and experience

Mobility and Publics
Samruddhi Pawar, 2022

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Street as a carnival


Mobility and Publics
Simran Panchal, 2020

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