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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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The life of death

Forms for Spirituality, Religion and Capital
Ansh Shetty, 2024


In an attempt to create a profitable tourist destination in my ancestral hometown of Banaras, the Kashi Vishwanath Temple boundary was recently redeveloped by the Government of Uttar Pradesh into what is now the Kashi Vishwanath Temple Corridor. Long sweeping stretches of newly planned hallways, a monument of the modern understanding of religious tourism built for the middle class continue to replace smaller gullies, neighbourhoods and livelihoods. As this redevelopment waits to raze the last leg of  Manikarnika Ghat, the Hindu holy cremation ground, I began to gaze deeply at death in the city of Benaras. A slow-burning sense of unease rises from the columns of smoke as the Ghat coils into a moment before change. 

The study of ‘death’ here not only hinges upon one of the liveliest sites of cremation but also becomes an apt metaphor indexing several erasures, including the death of urban culture, livelihoods, associated identities, and the architecture of the Ghat, which is at the brink of dissolving into the spectacle of tourism.

To de-layer this complex network of culture, identity, and architecture, I take an ethnographic approach to understanding the ‘life’ of death, its commerce, cultural implications, and spatial manifestations by looking at the actors that inhabit the ghat, their practices, and the spaces they occupy. In an attempt to probe deeper into strategies and remake the understanding of redevelopment, I ultimately ask, how does death live in the streets and ghats of Kashi?




Read also under ‘Memory and Belonging’:


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Spatialities of everyday heritage



Memory and Belonging
Aashika Vijaykar, 2020

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Galalelya jaga ("गाळलेल्या जागा"): overlaps of memory and home


Memory and Belonging
Aditi Bhandari, 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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