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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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Food, space, and city publics: publicness in Mumbai, through food cultures

Public Cultures
Eesha Pethe, 2023


Does food shape architecture? And if yes, how? These questions became relevant for Mumbai city, as now and then. Almost daily we are subjected to spaces that serve food, and we inhabit different spaces of food differently. The research is situated in the context of Mumbai and is interested in understanding enterprises that serve food–“the eateries”.

It became crucial to understand how food culture is produced and how it shapes the spatial organization and experience of eating. It was not so evident in the eateries that were newer in age as the forces that were driving these were different than the ones that were needed to understand “food cultures”. Hence, I studied significantly older eateries, where the primary force that was driving it was the “food”. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, this becomes highly relevant to Mumbai. It is a city of migrant settlers, every location in Mumbai changes in its characteristics because of where the ‘public’ is migrating from. To study this, I chose a small locality of Mumbai, the Dadar-Matunga scheme. It enabled me to observe closely the specificities that were related to the eateries.

This publicness gets manifested through multiple things like networks, histories, spatial organizations, and the public who come to the eatery. Different cultures allow different types of publicness to happen. In one case it happens through their ethics about mass food production. The resultant space thus becomes a space that caters to a large population, which organically changes according to the increase in demand for food. While the other one is a regimental space associated with the working class and nostalgia. These spaces are usually undesigned and do not hold value in terms of their stylistic appearances. But there is an idea of the “public” that emerges out of these interactions with the food itself. There is an exchange that takes place between the space, the food, and the public who come there to eat food. The food culture brings in the logic to formulate the space and the public brings their networks, associations, and friendships. These eateries, thus become important micro-public interventions in the city itself. They are not necessarily designed with the idea of aesthetics or theme but they bring about a sense of care and friendship among the moving public of the city.

Further, the study will also be an archive for the city to think about eateries or restaurants as public spaces. The process of documentation for the fieldwork included eating at these spaces, spending time, and experiencing the flux. Also, informal interviews of the owners or managers and the usual customers of these eateries were conducted, and a study of the media and literature archival material about these eateries, was to get a historical sense.





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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