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


Smellscapes: The Olfactory Politics Of Urban Space  

To be added
Avi Mendpara, 2025


Where Michael Taussig used the concept of Miasma in his book ‘My Cocaine Museum’ to suggest that smell carries meaning that is at once social, moral, and political, well beyond its specifically medical meaning of foul air and disease, this thesis builds on such a concept to move away from the old notion of miasma into an exploration of how smell shapes space, perception, and social life in the city. It treats smell not as background or nuisance but as something which actively shapes how cities are lived, organized, and imagined.

This thesis focuses on Dharavi in Mumbai, investigating how smells of work, waste, and industry reveal the city’s hidden metabolism and the flows of materials, labour, and life that keep it running. Furthermore,it shows how specific smells become associated with notions of purity and pollution, thereby creating social and spatial divisions based on caste, class, and labour.

By reframing smell as a medium of understanding rather than a marker of stigma, the thesis proposes an alternative way of reading the city, one that recognizes olfaction as central to its metabolism and meaning. Smell becomes a way to trace how cities breathe, decay, and regenerate; how value circulates through waste; and how belonging or exclusion is experienced through the senses. In doing so, the thesis situates smell not at the margins of urban life but at its core as a sensorial and political force that continuously shapes how space is inhabited, interpreted, and imagined.

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.