Dilip Da Cunha

Where does Design Begin?

Our design practice has long considered the line separating water from land on the earth surface a product of design; not in where and how it is drawn and engineered, but in that it is drawn at all. Today, we ask if the earth surface, a surface overwhelmed and undermined by rising seas, increasing storm events, species migration, destructive floods, and injustice, is likewise a product of design. What does it take to include both, surface and line in the design of habitation? It takes a sectional imagination and an appreciation of a wetness that is everywhere from clouds to aquifers.
 

About Dilip Da Cunha

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). In 2019, his book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press. It 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.  In 2017, they were awarded 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 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Ocean of Rain, an upcoming book and exhibition.

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