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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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6' x 4': excreta and beyond

Beyond norms and routines
Harsh Shah, 2024


 “It is the space where the hidden interior of the body comes into intimate contact with the hidden interior of the building, two plumbing systems temporarily connected.” (Colomina and Wigley, 2017)

Rituals of hygiene have its roots not only in personal well being but also in a complex web of purity and pollution ideas. These concepts have not only instilled order in the society but also spawned a particular space for performing hygiene rituals–the ‘Toilet’.

Toilets play a pivotal role in the daily life of a human, with or without them noticing it, it allows for one to spend the most intimate time with the self. Yet there is no conversation regarding the architecture of the toilet in the larger discourse. Coupled with this query is my medical condition which allows me to spend at least 1 hour a day defecating and creating a social life in that one hour. This backdrop led me to ask : How have rituals of hygiene produced various configurations of toilets in different housing types? Through this question I wish to establish a relationship between life and space of the toilet as well as elaborate on the extended definitions of the toilet that various housing types craft the space into.

The thesis focuses on understanding routines of the people around the toilet and ideas of a toilet produced in a house type. To take this forward I shortlisted 4 housing typologies across the city of Mumbai and studied the inhabitants routines and associations to the toilet as well as the relationship produced by the toilet and the housing type. These allowed me to compare how class also plays a role in the shaping of hygiene rituals and the household. The thesis finds that toilets play an integral role in shaping a household beyond hygienic and ritualistic ideas. It mobilises a community space in a case to the toilet being a very private entity oblivious of the household in another case. These findings open up fresh questions on the architecture of the prescribed way of designing a toilet, and hopes to strike a conversation in between architects to see toilets as an opportunity for intervention and not just a service.




Read also under ‘Housing and Typology’:

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What makes a home: a study of few homeless in Mumbai city

Housing and Typology
Aagam Shah , 2019

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Reimagining the transforming Basti


House and Typology
Shreyansh Gupta, 2018
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Of queering households


House and Typology
Trisha Salvi, 2018
To access the Thesis Works, kindly fill the following form with relevant details. 
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