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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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Of people and placemaking: gendered spatialities of joint family households

Textures of Spatial Relations
Radhika Choksi, 2023


Joint families are largely seen as perpetrating a regressive form of domestic life with strict hierarchical structures, hegemonic power dynamics and explicit gendered identities. But this form of living is simultaneously able to hold a myriad of other characteristics such as an intense overlap of routines, shared solidarities, exchange of everyday practices, and a mutual understanding of roles and responsibilities.

The thesis is set in the context of my personal experience of belonging to a joint family household and having felt the differential, but shifting nature of spaces which led me to interrogate how space shapes social relations and to what extent these relations get played out. “It is not just that the spatial is socially created; the social is spatially constructed too  (Massey, 1992).”

This gendered experience of space between the men and the women of the family gets opened up through their routines and their participation in space through various claims. Here, the routines do not become a series of activities simply relegated to chores, but have the capability to hold life through descriptions of practices of leisure and play and also are able to talk about the home spatially. The dense network of movements and activities shows the relation between humans and space, producing social behavior. To interrogate this question the thesis refers to the framework of social space and the role of gender in constructing it as referred to in Doreen Massey’s Space, Place and Gender, Daphne Spain’s Gendered Spaces and Ben Highmore’s Everyday Life Reader.

For the field, the stories of four households are observed, studied and analyzed. These households are chosen across a spectrum of classes. The unit of analysis here is the joint family, within which two members are followed and their routines opened up to help draw out the gendered organization of space within the household.

The field suggests that gendering as an experience is more explicitly observed in joint families that are spatially organized through newer conventions of b-h-k logics, where there is separation of spaces based on the concepts of privacy and individuality, where it is only the neutral spaces that are able to hold the multiple domestic lives of the family. As opposed to this when the family is organized through a space-making logic that can hold many functionalities, where various gender roles are allowed to overlap, a spatiality gets created that blurs the idea of difference, which promotes the idea of shared solidarities and allows an intersection of various domestic lives and practices.

The thesis proposes a spatiality that is able to think of segregation differently, a space which blurs the idea of home which is being mitigated through gender roles and also afford the privacy and space for personal pursuits.




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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