Renowned architect and landscape architect Anuradha Mathur and architect and planner Dilip da Cuna will be in the Netherlands early December and will give an extra 1Lectures on 5 December 2019 at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam.
Separating land and water is not just an act of division; it is also an act of creation. It creates land and water from ubiquitous wetness, defining them on either side of a line. It is one of the first acts of design, setting out a ground of habitation with a line that has largely been naturalized in features such as the coastline, the riverbank, and the water’s edge. These features are subjected to artistic representations, scientific inquiry, infrastructural engineering, and landscape design with little awareness of the act that brought them into being. Today, however, with the increasing frequency of flood and, not unrelatedly, sea-level rise attributed to climate change, the line of separation has come into sharp focus with proposals for walls, levees, natural defenses, and land retirement schemes. These responses raise questions on where the line is drawn, but they also raise questions on the separation that this line facilitates. Is this separation found in nature or does nature follow from its assertion? Are there other beginnings to design and consequently, other possible natures and grounds of habitation?
This question is raised by Dilip da Cunha in his new book “The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent.” It is beneath Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha’s design inquiry and practice for two decades. Through projects, exhibitions, studios and writings, they have critiqued the land-water imagination that they see underlying the current ground of habitation. And they are invested in seeding new imaginations grounded in wetness, its ubiquity, complexity and propensity for openness.
Photo via University of Pennsylvania
Dilip da Cunha is co-director of the Risk and Resilience program at Harvard University, and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. Anuradha Mathur is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
They are authors of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009); and co-editor of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). Dilip da Cunha’s most recent book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (2019).
1Lectures | The Invention of Rivers | Anuradha Mathur + Dilip da Cunha
Date: Thursday 5 2019
Time: 8 PM / Doors 7.45 PM
Location: Academy of Architecture Amsterdam, Waterlooplein 213
Language: English
Tickets: 7,50
Academy of Architecture Amsterdam students are entitled to free admission on presentation of their student ID card.
