Thesis Symposium 2025

Reflections on Three Days of Conversations

Aditya Bhoite

A symposium, by definition, is a gathering where people come together to exchange ideas, test arguments, and open up new lines of thought. Over the three days of our Thesis Symposium, this meaning felt fully realised. As students, we were not merely presenting our work, we were collectively mapping the many ways architecture, social life, and spatial imaginaries intersect today.

The presentations, organised in panels of three to four, were grouped not by convenience but by conceptual resonance. This created small constellations of inquiry: socialities and everyday infrastructures, the production of space in planned and unplanned contexts, more-than-human interactions, speculative and conceptual approaches, and questions of ethics, care, and urban entanglements. Hearing these projects in proximity made each thesis sharper; ideas echoed, challenged, and complicated one another.

As a student-participant, what struck me most was how each thesis moved beyond architecture as a problem of form, and instead positioned it as a discipline deeply entangled with anthropology, ecology, and politics. Space was never treated as a neutral container, it was always a social relation, a negotiation, an effect of histories and practices.

Our panelists: Kush Patel, Arul Paul, and Soumini Raja brought their diverse backgrounds in architecture, theory, and design research to the discussion. Their interventions did not simply “evaluate” our work; they expanded it. They questioned the assumptions beneath our methods, pushed us to see the cultural and political stakes of our observations, and opened up alternate readings of the sites and situations we worked with. It felt less like defending a thesis and more like being invited into a wider intellectual conversation.

Across these three days, the symposium became not just a platform for presenting completed work, but a shared space of thinking; where architectural research met social inquiry, personal curiosities met theoretical frameworks, and individual projects collectively outlined the evolving concerns of our generation of designers.