SEA CITY is the School of Environment and Architecture’s outreach programme. SEA City organizes events, lectures, symposia and exhibitions in order to engage with the larger artistic and cultural discursive sphere within and outside the city. SEA City events are completely open to all public, and are attended by a diverse group of people including students, architects, professionals, academics and locals.
THROUGH A GLASS, OBLIQUELY
20-22 NOVEMBER 2025
Through a glass, obliquely is a three-day symposium that aims to foster conversations around new ways of understanding the relationship between life and space, and the insights that can be drawn from them. The discussions will be grounded in the spatial inquiries and arguments developed by final-year undergraduate students at SEA. These inquiries can be broadly organised into five thematic areas. The first explores the spatial practices through which rigid spatio-temporal forms are made mutable, adaptable, and soft, allowing for new forms of individual and collective life. The second examines what spatial studies of interactions and frictions between human and more-than-human entities can teach us about the anthropocentric assumptions that shape architectural thought and practice. The third considers how urbanisation unfolds across different geographies, transforming cultural forms and the spatial lives that inhabit them. The fourth set of inquiries explore the relationships between morphology, behavioral patterns, and urban life. Finally, the fifth looks at possible methods for studying existing spatial conditions so that space can be understood through more fluid, relational, and non-binary ways of thinking.
respondents
Dr. Kush Patel is an Associate Professor and leads the MA Contemporary Art Practice at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology in Bengaluru, where they also direct and steward the Just Futures Co-lab and head the overall MA Program.
Soumini Raja is a Professor and Head of the Department at Avani Institute of Design, Kerala, and Chairperson of the Board of Studies in Design at the University of Calicut, India. She co-founded Studio Commune and serves as its Director of Research.
Arul Paul is an architect, educator and scholar, currently serving as an Associate Professor at the Nitte Institute of Architecture in Mangalore.
with the faculty of SEA.
Join us on
20-22 NOVEMBER 2024
at
SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT & ARCHITECTURE
Eksar Road, CKP Colony, Borivali West, Mumbai - 400 091
This event is free and open to the public. The event has been partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.
A SEA City Initiative.
Download PDF Schedule Docket
Dr. Kush Patel is an Associate Professor and leads the MA Contemporary Art Practice at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology in Bengaluru, where they also direct and steward the Just Futures Co-lab and head the overall MA Program.
Soumini Raja is a Professor and Head of the Department at Avani Institute of Design, Kerala, and Chairperson of the Board of Studies in Design at the University of Calicut, India. She co-founded Studio Commune and serves as its Director of Research.
Arul Paul is an architect, educator and scholar, currently serving as an Associate Professor at the Nitte Institute of Architecture in Mangalore.
with the faculty of SEA.
Join us on
20-22 NOVEMBER 2024
at
SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT & ARCHITECTURE
Eksar Road, CKP Colony, Borivali West, Mumbai - 400 091
This event is free and open to the public. The event has been partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.
A SEA City Initiative.
Download PDF Schedule Docket
next on SEA City
Architectural Practice In India: A Millennial Archaeology - Part 2
winter 2025-26
At the threshold of the first quarter of the millennium, which also marks a generation since India’s economic liberalization, architectural practice in India is ripe for a critical re-evaluation. In this period, the country has gradually, yet starkly shifted from a socialist framework to a neoliberal state, where developmental politics has ramified architectural production into new directions and logics. Existing scholarship on the built environment in India has often focused narrowly on the aesthetics of form, the evolving identity of the architect, or the reception of modernism as inherited from the West. Architectural discourse has largely taken one of two paths: either documenting work deemed academically significant, or framing emerging practices in terms of identity—often measured against binaries such as modern versus indigenous/vernacular. Such approaches tend to posit the architect as a servant of academic canons or fixed ideals.
Architectural practice on the ground, as it appears now, is far more complex - one that exhibits reorientation of spatial ideals and values to reflect a rapidly evolving society increasingly shaped by media, consumerism, and aspirations of globalisation. Once trained architects step into the field, the idealism of modernism is quickly refracted through geopolitical urgencies and the pragmatic demands of practice. What is often overlooked is the inherent political exigency that compels practice to adapt—making the operations and expressions of architecture more malleable and responsive to emerging needs of the market - in its widest extensions. In such contexts, architects evolve new formats, languages, agencies, and strategies to negotiate their professional knowledge to remain relevant within the real-world demands of building reinterpreting spatial briefs through the vocabularies of capital, conservation, environment, real estate, and more.
‘Architectural Practice in India: A Millennial Archaeology’ seeks to examine how architectural practice in India has developed over the last three decades within the framework of the millennial shift in its political economy. What forces—of power, ambition, and institutional pressure—have shaped architectural production during this period and how does it reorganise the delivery of the built environment? What aspects of practice gain currency in the emerging market and how does the professional architect find reconciliations and directions in addressing these. In excavating these variegated forms of practice that shape the unevenness of our built landscape today, these discussions aim to explore tendencies such as the rise of managerial approach, the renewed focus on environmental and heritage concerns, the emergence of artisanal and communitarian agendas, the urgency of urbanistic thinking, response to media and the integration of computational and digital thinking that come to constitute distinct, yet composite strands of spatial practice today.
The new cycle of SEA City Conversations is conceived as a year-long series of panel discussions featuring architects and spatial commentators, whose own practices have decisively responded to the millennial shifts in the region, by means of slipping, fitting or pushing the envelopes of conventional formats of practice. Methodologically, the series will draw upon the professional biographies of practitioners from across the city whose trajectories have remained representatively pivotal in bringing and operating in such changing dynamics of practice. Through reflexive interrogation and collective debate over the upcoming year, the programme imagines to present itself as an open course for the city, and invite the public to participate in a collective architecture history-writing exercise that seeks to critically engage with the evolving realities of contemporary architecture in India.
sessions
December 05, 2025 Media Practices and Architecture
January 16, 2026 Contemporary Artistic Practices & Architecture
February 27, 2026 Communitarian & Activist Practices
March 13, 2026 Computational & Digitally Driven Practices
Architectural practice on the ground, as it appears now, is far more complex - one that exhibits reorientation of spatial ideals and values to reflect a rapidly evolving society increasingly shaped by media, consumerism, and aspirations of globalisation. Once trained architects step into the field, the idealism of modernism is quickly refracted through geopolitical urgencies and the pragmatic demands of practice. What is often overlooked is the inherent political exigency that compels practice to adapt—making the operations and expressions of architecture more malleable and responsive to emerging needs of the market - in its widest extensions. In such contexts, architects evolve new formats, languages, agencies, and strategies to negotiate their professional knowledge to remain relevant within the real-world demands of building reinterpreting spatial briefs through the vocabularies of capital, conservation, environment, real estate, and more.
‘Architectural Practice in India: A Millennial Archaeology’ seeks to examine how architectural practice in India has developed over the last three decades within the framework of the millennial shift in its political economy. What forces—of power, ambition, and institutional pressure—have shaped architectural production during this period and how does it reorganise the delivery of the built environment? What aspects of practice gain currency in the emerging market and how does the professional architect find reconciliations and directions in addressing these. In excavating these variegated forms of practice that shape the unevenness of our built landscape today, these discussions aim to explore tendencies such as the rise of managerial approach, the renewed focus on environmental and heritage concerns, the emergence of artisanal and communitarian agendas, the urgency of urbanistic thinking, response to media and the integration of computational and digital thinking that come to constitute distinct, yet composite strands of spatial practice today.
The new cycle of SEA City Conversations is conceived as a year-long series of panel discussions featuring architects and spatial commentators, whose own practices have decisively responded to the millennial shifts in the region, by means of slipping, fitting or pushing the envelopes of conventional formats of practice. Methodologically, the series will draw upon the professional biographies of practitioners from across the city whose trajectories have remained representatively pivotal in bringing and operating in such changing dynamics of practice. Through reflexive interrogation and collective debate over the upcoming year, the programme imagines to present itself as an open course for the city, and invite the public to participate in a collective architecture history-writing exercise that seeks to critically engage with the evolving realities of contemporary architecture in India.
sessions
December 05, 2025 Media Practices and Architecture
January 16, 2026 Contemporary Artistic Practices & Architecture
February 27, 2026 Communitarian & Activist Practices
March 13, 2026 Computational & Digitally Driven Practices
