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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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Mongrel Architecture - Spaces that refuse to stay still  

To be added
Mayuri Naik, 2025


This research investigates how existing residential buildings in Mumbai transform to accommodate new functions that extend beyond their original domestic intent. It studies transformation as a spatial, social, and economic process that allows architecture to evolve within the dense and dynamic fabric of the city. Historically, commercial and office activities in Mumbai have been concentrated in the southern and central urban districts such as Fort, Dadar, and Lower Parel, while the suburbs primarily served as residential zones for those who commuted daily to work. In recent years, this pattern has shifted as the rise of small-scale entrepreneurship and local services has turned suburban neighbourhoods into active economic landscapes. Areas such as Malad, Kandivali, Gorai, and Borivali now exhibit a growing mix of domestic and commercial programs, where houses and apartments are reimagined as clinics, preschools, gyms, and small businesses.

The research explores this transformation as a process of reconfiguration rather than reconstruction, examining how existing buildings adapt through alterations in layout, circulation, and access to support new programs. Through selected case studies, it analyses spatial flexibility, circulation, and typological compatibility as key frameworks that determine how architecture accommodates change.

The study concludes that in the contemporary suburban context, transformation is not an exception but an ongoing condition of survival and renewal. Architecture in Mumbai functions as a living organism that evolves with time, occupation, and circumstance. The concept of Mongrel Architecture captures this fluid and hybrid condition, presenting a city where spaces continuously adapt and reinvent themselves in response to the changing rhythms of urban 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

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