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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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Beyond Ownership: Life in government housing

To be added
Vijay Chavan, 2025


This thesis explores how a sense of belonging is created in government-provided housing through spatial practices. Centered on the Nashik Police Headquarters, a state-planned settlement built between 1927 and the 1990s, the research traces how standardized housing, designed for efficiency and order, transforms over time through the life actions of its residents.

Government housing is often imagined as uniform, bureaucratic, and impersonal to be occupied by a neutral subject - one whose occupancy shall always be rolling, incumbent upon the appointment and never permanent for life. Yet, through years of occupation, it becomes layered with memory, adaptation, and care of the specificities of people and their desire to come together as a community. The police quarters in Nashik were conceived as part of a disciplined system of repetitive “lines” of twelve identical units, with shared institutional and recreational facilities such as schools, temples, and gymkhanas forming a self-sufficient neighborhood. But what unfolds within this grid is a parallel narrative: residents altering, extending, and personalizing spaces to meet their everyday social and familial needs.

Through archival research, fieldwork, and drawing-based documentation, this thesis examines how belonging is spatially negotiated beyond ownership. Field studies focus on two scales: the household, where families transform their units incrementally, and the public realm, where shared spaces like verandahs and informal seating between the houses and blocks become extensions of domestic life. These spaces blur the boundary between private and communal, becoming stages for interaction, ritual, and memory.

The drawings act not merely as representations but as analytical tools tracing morphologies of change and revealing how the architecture of government housing transforms and evolves through the lived experiences of its residents. By observing how state-planned housing becomes lived space, this research argues that belonging is not a product of legal possession but of participation and time. It is built through routines and extensions that make the temporary permanent, and the ordinary deeply personal.



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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