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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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Animal infrastructures and everyday life

Life in Spatial Intersections
Shriya Parab, 2023


This dissertation delves into the relationships between humans and non-human species in Mumbai’s urban spaces, amid rapid urbanization and modernization over the last century. The research aims to understand the slow marginalization of animals within the scheme of human inhabitation in a modernizing urbanity. The initial findings underscore that non-human species are deemed worthy of urban space only if deemed productive. Infrastructures designed for animals give rise to intricate relationships involving care, work, rituals, and sacredness.

Five distinct cohabited sites within the city of Mumbai were selected for analysis. These sites were selected to frame the changing human-non-human species relationships across varying conditions of inhabitation within the emerging urbanity of Mumbai. The sites include Panjrapole in a residential neighborhood of Bhuleshwar, stray animal habitats around the Metro staff quarters in Borivali, an ephemeral cowshed along a footpath in Gorai, a stray dog's habitation within a cooperative housing society in Gokuldham, and multi-animal shelter in Abhishek Niwas in Goregaon. Methodologically, diverse animal habitat responses are mapped, everyday activities documented, relationships between built forms and animal habitats examined, and interviews conducted with caretakers. Video documentation provides insights into animal perspectives.

The research concludes that there is a need to reconsider ways in which architectural form can be reconceptualized to imagine the co-habitation of human and nonhuman species within densifying urban neighborhoods.  Animals are active participants in the complex choreography of human-nonhuman relations, shaping our understanding of home, habitat, and interdependence in the contemporary urban landscape. This deeper awareness calls for a reevaluation of how we design and inhabit our shared spaces, recognizing the intricate ecologies that unfold at the intersection of human and nonhuman lifeworlds.




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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SEA Archives 2014© by the School of Environment and Architecture is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.