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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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Anatomy of Demolitions: A Case of Bheemchhaya Nagar

To be added
Swara Chavan, 2025


“Social relations developed in a habitat over years disappear when habitats get demolished and rehabilitated on terms that aren’t one’s own; what is built over the years gets taken away” (Khanolkar, 2023). These relations are built over a long stretch of years and produce a layered form of practices and inhabitations. But the government has always reduced these habitats/ Slums, as they call them, as places of disease, unhygienic, and having a lack of economic opportunities. The major propaganda of a lot of the developing countries, including that of India, is the aspiration to become “slum-free.” In the context of Mumbai, where more than 70% of the population resides in slums, the ambition is both ambitious and deeply complex.

Slum demolitions emerge as a residue of this agenda- events that, within the span of a day, eradicate the formed ways of life to rubble. However, these acts of erasure also induce their own logics and specificities within the affected communities.

This thesis therefore, asks: How do people produce forms of logic and inhabitation prior to, during, and post slum demolition?

The inquiry unfolds through the case of Bheemchhaya Nagar in Vikhroli, a settlement that has gone through multiple demolitions by the forest department. But the basti over the course of years have produced logics to resist, rebuild, persist, and grow as a community and a neighborhood. Through the method of storyform, urban history, data collecting and individual stories, a narrative is reconstructed. Here, the idea of home goes beyond the physicalities of the built envelope and transcends into a network of communities and relationships formed over the years of struggle. It questions our traditional understanding of planning, building, and privacy to an alternative one rooted in everyday negotiation and imaginations of 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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