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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 Afterlife of Abandonment: Forensic Methods of Seeing    

To be added
Lohitha Rao, 2025


Land has long been a site of negotiation and contestation; claimed, divided, and redefined through shifting systems of power, production, and occupation. Within cities today, land is rarely left unaccounted for; it is measured, priced, and tightly controlled. Yet amidst this density, one still encounters stretches of housing, industrial, and commercial blocks, left to decay, where spaces are caught between presence and absence. These conditions of abandonment reveal complex layers of human history, economic transactions, and ecological successions, prompting questions about how territories evolve once human control recedes.

This thesis investigates such terrains as layered archives of abandoned sites. In these sites, change unfolds not through erasure but through slow, uneven processes, fractures, overgrowth, and material weathering that speak to both resistance and renewal. The landscape thus becomes a political and sensorial field, one that records the memory of extraction while simultaneously nurturing forms of resurgence and adaptation.

By engaging closely with these spaces, the thesis seeks to challenge common perceptions of abandoned sites, treating them as living documents that reveal the city’s metabolic cycles of use, decay, and reclamation. Abandonment, in this sense, is not a void but a transitional condition: a moment where new agencies, both human and non-human, begin to negotiate their presence. These terrains invite us to reconsider urban life beyond the logics of productivity, tracing how decay itself can generate meaning, continuity, and the quiet persistence of life.

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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