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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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PLAYin City: Adaptive play/forms in Malwani, Mumbai.

To be added
Parth Kocharekar, 2025


The modernist thinking of dualism- specifying areas for work, living, and leisure- raises the larger epistemological question of free play- outside of designated spaces, which operates in the liminal, challenges the dominance of rational reductionist thinking (Foucault, 1978) by emphasizing impermanence, fluidity, and multiplicity. In densely populated neighborhoods in Mumbai, the question of free space is answered through newer, softer forms of play, invented through ephemeral spatial claims and imagination. These forms are usually creative assemblages of available resources employed in leftover and in-between spaces by individuals or a collective.

The research was conducted through dérives in Malwani’s informal settlement and the adjacent Gaothans- Rathodi and Kharodi, west Malad villages in Mumbai. I was able to identify patterns of gathering, leisure nodes, and several play forms within this tight neighborhood. For the sake of this thesis, I chose three distinct forms operating at various scales: (i) a calisthenics park in Rathodi gaothan, private land which transforms into a semi-public “park”, (ii) Ali or Gaondevi talav in Kharodi, where fishing is practiced in the pond with waste water discharge, (iii) a Ganpati pandal by the Gaondevi maidan, a makeshift folly by a mixed-ethnic group, depoliticalizing the festivities.

With this, we enter this thesis with the question: “How does play claim and transform space in a dense urban neighborhood in Mumbai?”. This thesis examines the relationship between these playacts in conjunction with their cultural context and urban form, where they are activated. The playforms employ tectonic configurations such as skins, surfaces, scaffolds, and boundaries, which become toolkits for creating “magic circles” where play activates. In mixed-ethnic, dense neighborhoods, the role of “play” goes beyond leisure as an active tool for resistance and reclaiming agency through space.

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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