“Nature by Design” Dilip da Cunha, architect & planner, 1960 Scholars Program in Envi Studies
Thu, November 11th, 2021
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
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NATURE BY DESIGN
Dilip da Cunha is an architect and planner based in Philadelphia and Bangalore, and Adjunct Professor at the GSAPP, Columbia University. He is author with Anuradha Mathur of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009); and editor of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). His most recent book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. The book received the 2020 ASLA Honor award and the J.B. Jackson Book Prize.
In 2017, Mathur and Da Cunha initiated a design platform called Ocean of Wetness directed to imaging and imagining habitation in ubiquitous wetness rather than on a land-water surface. (www.mathurdacunha.com) In 2017, they were recipients of a Pew Fellowship Grant and in 2021, the Mercedes T. Bass Landscape Architects in Residence Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. In 2020 da Cunha received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In a world where wetness is everywhere in the air, earth, flora and fauna, the reading of water in containable places and predictable events is by design. This design is led by two brilliant inventions: the line and the surface. Together they have been deployed to not just engineer the separation of ‘land’ from ‘water’; but to also articulate elements that we take for granted as natural, including rivers. How was this design carried out and was it the means of colonizing peoples who today remain disadvantaged and exploited?
Sponsored by the Class of 1960 Scholars Program in Environmental Studies and the Center for Environmental Studies.
All are welcome to this Zoom Event: Join Zoom Meeting https://williams.zoom.us/j/92380613230?pwd=cU42ZTllUnNCbXIvREI5c1lZOGloQT09 Meeting ID: 923 8061 3230 Passcode: 773602