Sem 09 / Form and Space Studies
Making Spatial Arguments

Prasad Khanolkar

The 2024 Undergraduate Thesis Symposium was titled Space Beside Itself. It drew together the research inquiries of SEA’s 2024-25 cohort to explore how we can read, sense and draw space otherwise. The notion of space as ‘otherwise’ was conceived of not as something outside, but as spatialities that are held in and besides the normative, the universal, the standardised, and other hegemonic registers that dominate our space. The 2024-25 cohort explored this aspect of space by asking a range of questions: How do we read space as commons? What forms of publics emerge in cities in and beyond the planned ones? What forms of practices extend public infrastructures beyond its given promise? What are the spatialities of care with which people live through the indifference of bio-political norms? What are the limits of and the affordances in urban types that populate our world? What forms of intensities emerge when cities expand and redevelop? What logics of space emerge in reading and playing in other mediums? How do we excavate, hold, or create spatial memories and histories in an eviscerating and violent present? What are the new urban forms and spatial logics that are emerging amidst the networks of power, religion and capital? What other everyday registers of space are at work amidst those of gendered, heteronormative, and abled bodies? What spatial forms of religion and capital are shaping our world today? In their research, students took up inquiries into the limits of the standards, the norms, the types,  that pervade most of architectural thinking and practice today, as well as studied the ‘other spatialities’ that  are at work around us. 

For instance, Sharvin Jangle made a glossary of the indigenous spatial terms through which Kolis inhabit and imagine amphibious geographies; Maitri Shah studied the spatialities of everyday queer lives; Harsh Shah looks at the life that is held in a 6x4’ toilet; Swara Chaudhary and Mrunmai Bailke focussed on the forms of care that shape lives of elderly; Prathamesh Deshmukh, Atisha Bhuta, and Neel Bothra studied the forms of spatialities and their power dynamics in the mediums of text, games, and photographs; Anika Pugalia, Khusbhoo Tejwani and Aditi Bhandari explored how memories of violence, displacement, and resettlement continue to be a part of the new spaces that people inhabit. On the other hand, Pranav Kadambi, Aditya Mahajan, and Neha Shah studied the new emerging urban conditions in urban peripheries and second cities; Subodh Shelke, Keerat Kaur Gill and Smaiksha Bhagde looked at how large urban infrastructure projects produce new unintended spatialities that move away from their  intended goals; Zahra Bagasrawala, Dhruvi Kachalia, Tanushree Bhagwat and Jinal Trivedi  looked at the mechanics of territorialisation and deterritorialisation of commons. By exploring these questions and field areas, the undergraduate thesis seminar opened up new dialogues in the fields of architecture and architectural research.