The Bricoleur: Bricolage As Method 

One of the key shifts in SEA’s orientation is to think of pedagogic institutions not as a space for the

delivery of static prescriptions or syllabuses, but rather as a collection of diverse practices with different

intentions, methods, questions and positions. Here space is provided for the academic practices of

teachers and an institutional framework is developed for that purpose.

The practitioners at SEA have their own, independent research and varying orientations within academia

which range from curatorial practices to explorations of new material technologies, and diversely

situated research methodologies adopted to studying emerging city making practices, manifold

responses to built and natural environments, and relationships between patterns and their embedded

aberrations in housing, among several others. Their academic practices are considered valuable precisely

because they add to and expand existing knowledge and practices (particularly in the areas of design)

and build corollaries across fields. These practices take the form of artisanal, artistic, reflective and

projective experimentations and explorations and produce research papers, courses, academic

presentation, all kinds of artworks, built-form experiments, design experiments, thinking and analytical

models, theoretical frameworks, etc. SEA aims at creating an ecology for supporting and nourishing such

pursuits.

The pedagogical ambition of the Allied Design course is to question existing assumptions about the

institution. It is an invitation to rethink the architectural institution as largely concerned with producing

individuals with capacities to build towards perceiving it as a collaborative of heterogeneous, distinct and

autonomous directions within architecture that inform each other and draw out the merit in each other.

The studio aims to provide space for such an expanded idea of spatial design, where the design of the

self and design of life itself become the key objectives.

The course is structured such that each faculty member anchors a studio that centres the questions that

their individual practices seek to investigate. These questions raise a longue durée engagement and are

deeply connected to philosophical processes. The course takes place during the Monsoon Semester and

is four weeks long, and offered to all students at SEA.

Each student becomes a collaborator and a companion in the practice of the teacher, bringing their

insights and personal experiments to the processes set up by the course. Each teacher defines the

pedagogic objectives for the students, and uses the objectives to set up new frames of thinking. It is

important to consider that the courses are less concerned with the production of superficial

manifestations of learnings (rather, the courses refute traditional ideas of production) than with creating

conceptual anchors through cross pollinating processes of questioning-reading-investigating-making that

stay with the student as approaches towards spatial thinking and design.

SEA recognises that the field of spatial design is much more than the building-making process and the

Allied Design studio aims at actively fostering a space to hold such an expanded idea. Students are

familiarized with the possibilities of spatial design practices beyond building making. It is both hoped and

expected that the process of building-making itself will encounter and incorporate unhackneyed and

inventive modes of imagination through such forays in architectural pedagogy.