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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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Gaam nu ghar: interplay of home making, religiosity, and entrepreneurial capital in Beraja

Forms for Spirituality, Religion, and Capital
Vivek Khuthiya, 2024


 Gaam nu ghar, meaning "a home in the native village," is a spatial practice emerging among the migrant trader communities of Kutch, particularly in the context of their shifting relationships with religion, entrepreneurial capital, and long-term migration. This research examines gaam nu ghar in my native village of Beraja, in the Mundra taluka of Kutch—a village with a thriving Jain population until the 1960s, when successive generations migrated to Mumbai in search of work and entrepreneurial opportunities. As a result, many ancestral homes were left abandoned, with families returning only for religious observances. This recurring return to the village, more in the past few decades, has sparked the phenomenon of gaam nu ghar, fostering new forms of homemaking that are closely intertwined with religiosity, entrepreneurial capital, and social mobility.

Fieldwork for this study took place during the monsoon of 2024 (June–September), a period marked by peak religious gatherings in the village. I leveraged kin networks and engaged in medavo—informal conversations with groups of kin and friends about stories, nostalgia, news, gossip, and speculation. These conversations revealed five families, each of who have built a gaam nu ghar, driven by various forces, including family dynamics, entrepreneurship, kin relationships, and religious devotion. Each family’s home is examined as a unique biography.

The first biography explores how land is commodified and how building a home can yield intangible capital in the form of religious virtues. The second examines how nucleating families lead to the division and expansion of homes, highlighting the need for individuals to assert their presence. The third discusses how the 2001 earthquake acted as a catalyst for modernising homes and how friction between sects influenced the creation of architectural forms that assert presence through scale and visibility. The fourth analyzes an apartment as a type and how it is appropriated through donations, social capital, and the promise of religiosity, going beyond real estate or market-driven logics. The fifth reads into the articulation of a modest home, which overlaps with the remnants of the traditional home and the desire for the functionality of a city home.

This thesis argues that gaam nu ghar is a complex homemaking practice that extends beyond conventional spatial arrangements and typologies. It is an evolving, cyclical practice rooted in the intersections of religiosity, capital accumulation, and the stratified social fabric of the Jain community in Kutch.




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