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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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Homing as accrual: learning from incremental housing

Accretions
Aboli Rithe, 2023


The dissertation emerges from a concern that sees the imagination of most houses as being straitlaced and stagnated by the BHK logic. This particular imagination of the form of the house has proliferated into most practices of house-making and brought about an imagination of life, which is very limited, sees practices of living as occurring within walls and is also in conflict with the practices of everyday life. These practices make and require much softer forms.

In one of the key references for this thesis, the paper Occupancy Urbanism, Solomon Benjamin proposes a new theory to look at cities beyond master planning, territory, and politics specific to southern cities. He believes that policy and administration should be reformed and made transparent because the world rejects the framework built around rules and laws. The other major work referred to is the Theory of Affordances by James J. Gibson, which investigates the interaction between individuals and their surroundings. It implies that the environment presents humans with a variety of options for action or "affordances" based on their perception and interaction with the environment.

Developing and further exploring this concept, the thesis focuses explicitly on incremental neighbourhoods of Motilal Nagar, Goregaon West; Artist Village, Belapur; and Charkop in Kandivali. These neighbourhoods were established in different settings with different objectives.

The dissertation also delves into the intricate dynamics of incremental housing, highlighting how it is slowly shaped by specific economic logic and the practices of everyday living. People who inhabit incremental housing engage in a prolonged and nuanced process of homemaking that evolves alongside their shifting economic conditions. This transformative journey is marked by adaptability and responsiveness, which allows residents to modify and enhance their living conditions in creative and resourceful ways as the economic condition shifts. This adaptability is not confined within the rigid boundaries of conventional housing models but instead prompts a fluid spatiality. This spatial flexibility gives rise to a unique form which is characterized by complexity, interconnectivity, and a high degree of transactional interactions. In contrast, modern houses with fixed rooms don't allow for these changes. My research demonstrates how we can implement these alterations using gentle methods that result in significant spatial improvements. In simpler terms, I explore ways to make homes more flexible and responsive, enabling them to adapt according to the needs of the people living in them. The thesis thus proposes learning from incremental neighbourhoods and their spatiality to consider a form of housing that is more agile and can accommodate a breadth of lived practices.




Read also under ‘Memory and Belonging’:


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Spatialities of everyday heritage



Memory and Belonging
Aashika Vijaykar, 2020

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Remembering ghar: continuities of memory


Memory and Belonging
Anika Pugalia, 2024

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Architecture of a monument: Vasai fort


Memory and Belonging
Chinmay Kadwadkar, 2018

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Architecture and memory: remembering home in involuntary dislocation

Memory and Belonging
Dhruv Chavan, 2018

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On Sindhi refugees: making home in Jalgaon


Memory and Belonging
Khushboo Tejwani, 2024

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Retrofitted domesticities


Memory and Belonging
Nikunj Dedhia, 2020

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Architecture and healing: civil war inversion of public space Borella, Colombo

Memory and Belonging
Rutu Kelekar, 2018

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Spatiality of remembrance: encounters between the native and urban

Memory and Belonging
Tanishqa Rodrigues, 2020

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