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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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[Room] for Play:  Study of ‘play’ spaces across five lower-income housing types in Mumbai

To be added
Varun Shetty, 2025


This thesis investigates the spatial conditions of “play” within dense low- to middle-income residential typologies in Mumbai over the past seventy-five years. These five housing types—slums, site and services, chawls, SRA buildings, and private apartments—together define nearly 60% of the city’s housing landscape, shaping the everyday lives of the majority of its residents. The current built forms are designed and executed through the rigid thinking of functional spaces, technicalities, and legalities.

‘Room for play’ looks at the space that is left in or produced by the inhabitants in their living environments in order to contain activities beyond the utilitarian dimensions of domesticity. It looks at how user groups of different ages and genders find or make space between thresholds, corridors, and courts or grounds for social interaction and exchange. In this thesis, I observe ways in which people subvert the mundane layouts of residential landscapes in order to create room for play in their context. What are these acts of ‘play’ in their daily practices? How do these acts find space in the sociopolitical context of housing? What are the various degrees of play across different built forms?  

Through comparative analysis of five dense residential neighbourhoods, the work identifies geographies of play as they exist in the chosen housing typologies. Further, it attempts to compile a glossary of “play-forms” that can be used as an architectural tool kit to create essential space for activities of social and psychological sustenance within dense neighbourhoods, ultimately making urban form more playful.

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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