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


Architecture of Familiarity: Familiarising with Navi Mumbai

To be added
Aditya Bhoite, 2025


This thesis explores familiarity as a spatial phenomenon; an everyday condition through which individuals negotiate the built environment beyond its formal design intentions. Unlike older neighbourhoods in Mumbai where spatial intimacy emerges through layered history, mixed-use streets, and porous thresholds, CIDCO’s sectoral planning introduced clear separations between housing, commerce, and movement. Through ethnographic observation, interviews with residents across generations, and spatial mapping of everyday routines, this study examines familiarity not as mere recognition of place, but as an embodied, relational practice shaped by repetition, sensory memory, social overlap, and informal encounter. Drawing on Lefebvre’s theory of spatial practice, Polanyi’s tacit knowing, and Felder’s work on urban familiarity, the research argues that design logics which privilege order, efficiency, and privacy risk thinning collective life.

It proposes that architecture and planning can actively cultivate familiarity by creating interstitial spaces, shared thresholds, and everyday infrastructures that foster participation, recognition, and belonging in contemporary urban neighbourhoods. By foregrounding the interplay between planning, lived experience, and sensory life, the research proposes that even within the rationalized grids of modern planning, spaces of warmth, memory, and social connection persist, emerging not from architecture alone, but from the relational and rhythmic inhabitation of the city.



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

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

On Sindhi refugees: making home in Jalgaon


Memory and Belonging
Khushboo Tejwani, 2024

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.