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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 Adapted Apartments:  A Study of Regulations, Practice, and Lived Space in Mumbai’s Housing

To be added
Anushka Thorat, 2025


My thesis focuses on the evolving nature of domestic space in Mumbai’s apartment housing — specifically on how residents continuously reinterpret and reconfigure their homes within the constraints of regulation. It examines the tension between the rigid frameworks set by planning codes and the fluid, lived realities that emerge within them. By observing everyday modifications and appropriations, the study seeks to understand how people make architecture their own — not through formal design, but through occupation, adaptation, and use.

In Mumbai’s apartment landscape, where every square foot is measured and regulated, the spaces that fall outside clear function often hold the most life. This research explores how non-functional or in-between spaces — such as dry balconies, passages, and niches — become vital to how families adapt, expand, and personalize their homes. What began as a response to development codes and efficiency-driven design has, over time, produced a new layer of domestic space — one that exists between regulation and improvisation.

Through a reading of the Development Control Regulations (DCRs) and case studies of apartments built under different decades of codes, the study traces how rules meant to standardize light, ventilation, and service zones have unintentionally created the margins where everyday life unfolds. These leftover spaces, often designed as secondary or technical, allow for moments of flexibility, privacy, and reconfiguration that nuance the spatiality of the home.

By combining regulation analysis, spatial documentation, and conversations with residents, the research positions these in-between zones as the true sites of domestic negotiation. It argues that the home in Mumbai today is not simply defined by its plan, but by how families inhabit and reinterpret what lies just beyond its intended function.

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

To access the Thesis Works, kindly fill the following form with relevant details. 
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