MATHUR | DA CUNHA

A lecture by Anuradha Mathur, an architect and landscape architect, Professor in the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dilip da Cunha, an architect and planner, Adjunct Professor GSAPP at Columbia University. They are the founders of the practice MATHUR | DA CUNHA and work between Philadelphia and Bangalore.

Mathur and da Cunha discussed their design practice that they situate in a critical zone of wetness (between clouds and aquifers) rather than on a surface divided between land and water.

Mathur and da Cunha are authors of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001), Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006) and Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009), and co-editors of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). Da Cunha’s new book The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. Mathur and da Cunha are currently working on a book and exhibition titled Ocean of Rain.

They have presented their work and ideas in academic and professional forums nationally and internationally and have been the recipients of many awards. They were joint recipients of a 2017 Pew Fellowship Grant and da Cunha received a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 2020. Most recently they were the Spring 2021 Mercedes T. Bass Landscape Architects in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

*Organized by Columbia University GSAPP Urban Design Program.