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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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Shifting Life Forms Of Spiti : a changing landscape

To be added
Drashti Thumar, 2025


The spatial narrative of change due to the shift in economic activities of a remote village and community in a tourist driven Valley of Himalayas brings new configuration or transformation in their ecosystem as well as the built-form of the village. Changing occupations change the spatial configuration of the houses as well as the associated landscape of the village. This study offers an empirical entry point to understand how the above shift, narrates the spatiality of landscape, built environment and households  in the face of change.

Despite significant globalizing forces impacting remote communities, there remains a gap in understanding how these sociocultural (referring to the social and cultural values, norms, and structures of a community)  and economic transformations (changes in the primary ways a community generates income and sustains itself) are manifested in the spatially in various categories. This is particularly evident as the rapidly growing tourism sector drives a construction and economic boom through conversion of  homes into guesthouses accommodating the travellers.Thus the everyday impact of these shifts appears in how space is reorganized. To address this I take the case of Mane village in the upper valleys of Himachal called Spiti. It's a high-altitude landscape known for its stark terrain, Buddhist heritage, and remote monasteries. For generations, its villages, including Mane, functioned through tight-knit agro-pastoral systems shaped by extreme climate and geographical isolation.

However, over the past two decades, tourism has become a growing economic presence in the region, drawn by Spiti’s terrain, monasteries and cultural distinctiveness.The methodology follows the study of the field in various spatial categories which are defined by their scales and thus inferring on the transformations. To do so. I make observations of the everyday routines of the villagers and then intervene into three households of the village to draw upon the present changes in their domain of the house.The study of these three households through their routines in the summer months allows me to connect all these further into the changing spatiality of the landscape.

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

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