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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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Human Life Forms around the Trees    

To be added
Sahil Sawant, 2025


This thesis explores how human life and social interactions are continuously negotiated around trees. It examines how trees influence the shaping of space and how people, in turn, give meaning to them through everyday acts and associations. The focus is not only on the physical form of trees but also on the interstitial spaces they create the shaded corners, open patches, and gathering spots that become extensions of homes and streets. Within these spaces, different narratives unfold: people rest, talk, hang clothes, or celebrate festivals under their canopies. Through such activities, a tree begins to hold a quiet control over a particular piece of land, becoming an anchor around which life organizes itself. claiming, resources, and infrastructures.

The study also moves beyond the collective to look closely at personal stories, how individuals perceive and relate to specific trees in their surroundings. For some, a tree might represent memory or belonging; for others, it may simply offer comfort or familiarity. These individual relationships often lead to acts of soft ownership and claiming, such as people begin to call a tree their own, name it after a family member, or care for it as part of their home. Yet, these attachments also blur the lines between care and control. There are moments of quiet trespass; someone plucking a fruit across a boundary wall, collecting fallen flowers, or taking a small cutting to grow elsewhere. These seemingly small acts reveal a deep emotional negotiation between legality, attachment, and desire. 

Through documenting these encounters, this thesis seeks to understand trees not merely as ecological entities but as active participants in shaping urban life, influencing behaviors, structuring space, and forming complex human–nonhuman relationships that define the everyday ecology of the city.
Through documenting these encounters, this thesis seeks to understand trees not merely as ecological entities but as active participants in shaping urban life, influencing behaviors, structuring space, and forming complex human–nonhuman relationships that define the everyday ecology of the city.

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. 
SEA Archives 2014© by the School of Environment and Architecture is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.