WATERS EVERYWHERE
Anuradha Mathur, an architect and landscape architect, is Professor in the Landscape Architecture Department, University of Pennsylvania. Dilip da Cunha, an architect and planner, is Adjunct Professor at the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and Visiting Faculty at Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology in Bangalore, and at Harvard GSD.
An underlying thread in Mathur and da Cunha’s work is a concern for how water is visualized and engaged in ways that lead to conditions of its excess and scarcity, but also the opportunities that its fluidity offers for new visualizations of terrain, design imagination, and design practice. This concern has also guided their teaching and design studios, more recently in Mumbai, Jerusalem, the Western Ghats of India, Sundarbans, and along the US – Mexico border. In 2013/14 they led a PennDesign Team for a project titled Structures of Coastal Resilience supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. They are authors of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (Yale University Press, 2001), Deccan Traverses: the Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006), Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (Delhi: NGMA and Rupa & Co., 2009), Splice: The Iconic Joint (Blurb, 2016), and co-editors of Design in the Terrain of Water (A+RD Publishers, San Francisco, 2014). Dilip’s new book titled The Invention of Rivers: Alexanders’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent is forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017/18.