SEA  
ARCHIVES  


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.


+ CORE COURSES
+ CULTURE STUDIES

+ CHOICE COURSES
+ SETTLEMENT STUDIES


Higher density led reconfiguration of space and life: Gangtok

Expansions, Intensification and Form
Neha Shah, 2024


This thesis explores the evolving relationship between people, property, and infrastructure amid rapid urban transformations in a dense residential neighbourhood in Gangtok, Sikkim. 

Through a combination of speculative mapping and oral histories, the study examines how surging residential density and adaptive building practices reflect and reshape the socioeconomic dynamics of this Hill city. Documenting shifts in land use, housing typologies, and intergenerational property-sharing, the research reveals a pattern of incremental building, where households expand vertically, and life is lived within these sectional layers. This layered growth reflects families’ strategies to adapt to economic and spatial constraints by reconfiguring spaces for a commune.

A central finding of this study is the increase in publicness within a densely built environment characterised by private ownership. Vertical expansion and dense housing arrangements have led to the emergence of shared spaces that add to a sense of community among residents of diverse backgrounds, leading to more integrated social networks and a defined sense of publicness.







Read also under ‘Memory and Belonging’:


Image 1

Spatialities of everyday heritage


Memory and Belonging
Aashika Vijaykar, 2020

Image 1

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

Memory and Belonging
Aditi Bhandari, 2024

Image 1

Remembering ghar: continuities of memory

Memory and Belonging
Anika Pugalia, 2024

Image 1

Architecture of a monument: Vasai fort

Memory and Belonging
Chinmay Kadwadkar, 2018

Image 1

Architecture and memory: remembering home in involuntary dislocation

Memory and Belonging
Dhruv Chavan, 2018

Image 1



Retrofitted domesticities


Memory and Belonging

Nikunj Dedhia, 2020

Image 1

Architecture and healing: civil war inversion of public space Borella, Colombo

Memory and Belonging
Rutu Kelekar, 2018

Image 1

Spatiality of remembrance: encounters between the native and urban

Memory and Belonging
Tanishqa Rodrigues, 2020

To access the Thesis Works, kindly fill the following form with relevant details. 
SEA Archives 2014© by the School of Environment and Architecture is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.