Prasad Khanolkar

The social landscape is being reshaped by new media, corporate ethics, autonomous technologies, self-learning, moralities around health and the environment, and the rise of platforms for visibility, exchange, and connection. This new order carries its own psyche, logic, and values, challenging traditional ideas of family, community, citizenship, rights, and institutional loyalty. These shifts deeply impact how we live, share space, and build our environments—transforming commons, infrastructure, and cities. The 2025 SEA Conference How do we grow? brought together architectural educators from different architectural institutions across India to share their work and reflect on how we navigate and grow within this evolving context. 

The conference was structured around three panels: New Pedagogies, New Methods, and New Institutional Forms. Participants shared recent and ongoing pedagogical explorations within their institutions, shaped by factors such as geographic context, institutional frameworks, spatial configurations, relationships to architectural practice, and core pedagogical values. Four distinct approaches emerged: one rooted in regional research and built experiments in the South; another emphasizing the integration of technology and architectural methods; a third exploring global building practices; and a fourth focused on the interplay between space and life in emerging South Asian urban contexts.

The second panel focused on methods in architectural education, with panelists reflecting on practices drawn from their own courses and institutions. Three distinct approaches emerged. The first explored the relationship between part and whole through iterative model-making, grounded in the belief that form and spatial relationships are best learned through repeated acts of making. The second approach used continual drawing experiments to investigate space, challenging the limitations of traditional orthographic tools in capturing experiential, sensorial, and socio-political dimensions. The third emphasized fostering a critical, autonomous, and more-than-human spatial awareness, encouraging students to engage with the broader world as responsive and reflective practitioners. The third approach emphasizes on students learning themselves to establish relationships with people and environments using different spatial tools rather than pre-established ideas.

The final panel addressed the institutional challenges and possibilities facing architectural education today, exploring the various forms such institutions might take. Discussions drew on factors such as financial models, affiliations with larger institutions, geographic settings, and the backgrounds and expectations of students. Four institutional models emerged: a collective structure uniting faculty and students with external networks; a flexible, non-spatial form built on friendships and solidarities across institutions; a model grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration with strong links to other fields; and a school functioning as both archive and urban laboratory with a multidisciplinary focus.

This diversity of institutional experiments highlighted the need for ongoing dialogue, the exchange of pedagogical tools, and collaborative programs—laying the groundwork for reimagining architectural education in India.