2023_Shruti Nikam — SEA Archives

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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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Sociality of architectural institutions

Bodies in Space
Shruti Nikam, 2023

“The ordering of space in buildings is really about the ordering of relations between people. One should also consider how the strategic architectural decisions about built form and spatial organization may have social consequences (Hillier, Bill, and Julienne Hanson, 1984, The Social Logic of Space). “

I have always been curious about how architecture shapes social life. Considering pedagogical institutions as a typological case study, I have tried to study the possible impacts of the ordering of spaces on social relations. This thesis tries to understand how the spatial configuration of institutions impacting higher education affects and informs the social life of its users, more specifically, the students. Given the urban dynamics of space in a city like Mumbai, most institutions emerge as vertical buildings with little or no open space. The lack of a campus compels the students to have their practices of inhabiting the space for socialization. Therefore, the users find new ways of subverting, expanding, or accommodating their social life by occupying the institution and its surroundings in new/ alternative ways. These urban campuses of architectural colleges are studied through a framework of four parameters: Movement in Space, Visual Features, Behaviour, and Event Calendar. This analytical framework helps to study how the organizational pattern affects this practice of habitation. The thesis aims to articulate a design language that may afford such different practices of habitation within architecture more effectively.

Read also under ‘Screens and Projections’:

Choreography between body and space

Bodies in Space
Aparajita Bhowmick, 2020

Towards cellularization

Bodies in Space
Bindiya Waghela, 2020

Performative bodies and space

Bodies in Space
Khushi Bagrecha, 2023

Perception and interstices: spatial transformations in public spaces post disruption

Bodies in Space
Nishith Parulekar, 2023

Shared personals: manifestation of the personal into the shared

Bodies in Space
Raksha Srivastava, 2020

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