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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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Once upon a space: study of narratives in shaping space

Narratives of Everyday
Rachit Somani, 2023


The dissertation explores the relationship between narratives and space, contending that our lives and the spaces we inhabit are not only forged by, but also experienced through, narrative structures. Narratives provide structure and meaning to our experiences. They not only provide us with a sense of identity and belonging but also influence our spatial experiences and interactions within the built environment. Beyond being physical entities, the spaces we inhabit are posited as manifestations of complex, consolidated narratives evolving over time. The study investigates how our understanding, imagination, and interaction with spaces are influenced by the narratives that define them.

The study is undertaken through three cases: the construction of ‘Monkey Man’ (an urban legend which became popular during 2001 in Delhi) through newspaper reports, the shaping of the morning routine of a woman through a series of ritualistic narratives, and the form of a small town modern kitchen through a series of narratives of efficiency, rituals, caste and gender dynamics, etc. In the case of the ‘Monkey Man’, numerous news articles were collected, and the spatiality of the neighborhood where the events of this story took place was constructed through stitching the spaces described in the articles. In the case of a woman’s routine, an unstructured interview was conducted, and the morning hour routine was broken down into tiny micro activities, and each of the activities was traced to a narrative or a series of narratives that formed the basis for it. In the case of the kitchen, a history of the kitchen was traced through a series of journal articles and studies of kitchens. Through these cases, one could conclude that contemporary spatiality is a consolidation of cultural, personal, and historical narratives of space over time.




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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