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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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Architecture of impermanence: interplay between human mobility, landscape, and architecture

Transience and Home
Pranjal Sancheti, 2023


What are the spatialities of home for circular migrants in Mumbai? This question is framed in the backdrop of the pervasive practices of circular migrants in Mumbai, whose rhythmic circulations between near and far regions of India call into question a prevalent common sense on the housing question through a provision of permanent, standardized, efficient, and ownership-based dwelling units—usually apartment type—for nuclear family households.

The research presented in this thesis draws upon my engagement with twelve low-income circular migrant households in Mumbai’s diverse neighborhood settings through in-depth semi-structured interviews and spatial documentation. The analysis draws attention to the migrant profile, rhythms of circulation, purpose of migration, the assemblage of networks, and the spatial affordances they produce in built form. The narrative drawing aims to establish the link between the assemblage of networks and their spatial affordance,s while the textual stories of circular migration focus on developing an understanding of how the socioeconomic contexts and aspirations lend to the rhythms of circulation.

I advance three arguments. First, rhythms of circular migration are shaped by livelihoods at the place of origin and destination. The rhythms of circular migration of my field interlocutors range from a short two-three-month stay, a half-yearly stay, to more than 10 months' stay at the point of destination in Mumbai.

Second, rhythmic circulation of migrants calls into question the notions of permanence and ownership in housing interventions by drawing attention to what makes life durable in the face of precarity. The durability of housing resides, not in the materiality of built form, but in the durability of socioeconomic and political networks that constitute the production of home. My research unravels these networks at multiple intersecting scales—tenement, cluster, neighborhood— that produce the infrastructural encounters of home-making practices. The strength and durability of these networks shape the home for the migrant. Everyday encounters make the networks stronger, whereas indirect networks add to its thickness .

Third, this network produces the spatiality of home for a circular migrant which comes together as a fluid assemblage of spaces, objects, and materials. Each of the cases extends to form a spatial provocation on home: Implicit boundaries and screens, in between spaces, extension to street, shared infrastructur,e and extended pathways, and passages.





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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