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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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How Spaces Shapes Us - Transitions of Typologies and Communal Life  

To be added
Lavanya Navale, 2025


Cities are constantly in motion, shaped by changing land markets, housing demands, and ongoing redevelopment. In Mumbai, redevelopment has become a dominant force driving urban transformation. These shifts not only alter the built form of homes and shared spaces but also reshape the social life and collective rhythms of residents. As older housing gives way to new forms, questions arise about what aspects of communal living are sustained, disrupted, or lost in this transition.

Girgaon, a historically rich neighbourhood at the foot of Malabar Hill, offers a lens into this transformation. Once defined by dense chawls that supported strong neighbourhood bonds, shared courtyards, and porous thresholds, Girgaon is now rapidly transforming with the rise of redeveloped high-rise towers. This change signifies more than a physical transformation; it reconfigures patterns of interaction, proximity, and everyday sociability that once characterized the community.

This study examines the shift from chawl to redeveloped high-rise housing through two sites in Girgaon, representing different typologies within the same urban fabric. It investigates how transformations in housing typology shape and afford possibilities for sociability and communal life. By tracing spatial arrangements, thresholds, and shared spaces, the research explores how built form enables or restricts collective living and how residents adapt or reinvent everyday rhythms through change.

Through spatial mapping, observation of daily practices, and documentation of lived spaces, the study examines how architecture mediates the relationship between the private and the collective. It seeks to understand how everyday interactions construct a sense of community or distance among residents.
Ultimately, the research portrays the transformation of housing not merely as an architectural or economic process, but as a social one in which shifts in form reshape ways of living together, and where the idea of community is continually negotiated in Mumbai’s evolving housing 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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SEA Archives 2014© by the School of Environment and Architecture is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.