The World Architecture Festival (WAF) has shared its ninth keynotes of Anuradha Mathur, Professor, Landscape Architecture, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania and Dilip da Cunha, Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, from the WAF 2019 stage. 

WAC releases exclusive lectures each week as part of WAC's media partnership with WAF. WAF's 2019 talks & keynotes series bring exclusive talks of outstanding architects to audience who was not able to participate to the festival in 2019. 

In their lectures, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha discuss the nature and importance of rains and waters in design. The architects also touch upon the difference between water and wetness and they explain how architects and designers should think together with natural disasters in design process.

"As architects, we generally see the possibility of designing and then the hurricane come, we design in order to withstand the hurricane, or withstand the storm," said Dilip da Cunha. 

"Instead of thinking like that, what we should be designing is in the hurricane, we should be designing in the storm. That means actually inhabiting the cycle."

"Inhabiting the cycle not inhabiting the surface, an accommodating as you call it nature as coming from beyond," Da Cunha added.

"It is just a start because then you move to also start thinking like - it’s not just about a project on the ground - it is also educational agenda."

"We call architects to begin to think on their role in the world today. We need a new imagination and architects are uniquely equipped with actually to deal with possibilities of a new imagination," Da Cunha continued.

Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha's lecture, titled What We Learn from Water, explores that "there are two waters in design." "The first is somewhere in flows and gatherings: in rivers, oceans, channels, pipes, reservoirs and lakes." 

"The second water is everywhere, a ubiquitous wetness that does not necessarily flow. It precipitates, soaks, seeps, osmotes, and evaporates in ways that defy delineation." 

"If the first water is in a crisis today with rising seas, melting glaciers, increasing floods, pollution, and scarcity, the second holds a way forward for design."

Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Airport Crossing, From SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary. 2009. Image courtesy of Mathur / da Cunha

"Our work is really working between starting to understand rain from very basic principles that’s what we have to deal with," said Anuradha Mathur in her speech.

Anuradha Mathur an architect and landscape architect is Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. 

Working between Philadelphia and Bangalore, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha's website Mathur / Da Cunha shows a series of analyses and projects stye have completed. 

Her work is focused on how water is visualized and engaged in ways that lead to conditions of its excess and scarcity, but also opportunities that its ubiquity offers for new visualizations of terrain, and resilience through design. 

Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur at the 2019 WAF stage. Image courtesy of WAF

This focus has guided her collaborative research, practice, and teaching with her partner Dilip da Cunha in diverse cultural milieus such as Mumbai, Jerusalem, Bangalore, the Western Ghats of India, Sundarbans, Coastal Virginia, US–Mexico border, and the desert of Rajasthan. 

She is author with Dilip da Cunha 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-editor of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014).

An analysis from the works of Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha. Image courtesy of Mathur / da Cunha

Dilip da Cunha is an architect and planner based in Philadelphia and Bangalore. He is co-director of the Risk and Resilience program at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 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 co-editor of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). 

His most recent book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, (University of Pennsylvania Press 2019) draws attention to rivers as a consequence of one of the most fundamental acts in the design of human habitation, namely, the separation of land from water. 

Soak: In the second section of Soak the architects draw out landscapes that survive beyond the delineating eye of the surveyor and pervasive colonial descriptions, both appreciative and critical, that begin by seeing Mumbai’s terrain divided into objects in geographic space. Image courtesy of Mathur / da Cunha

The World Architecture Festival, with its sister event World Festival of Interiors (INSIDE), are organized annually and WAF hosts a number of distinguished architects discussing a specific theme each year over the three-day festival, as well as its global awards program. Architects and designers present their projects live to a panel of expert judges. 

This year, WAF and INSIDE, which are still planned in typical way despite of the pandemic, will take place between 2-4 December, in Lisbon. But entry deadline for WAF and INSIDE have been extended to 14 August, 2020. Start your entry from here.

World Architecture Community is official Media Partner for this year's festival and offers to its Professional Members 10% discounted tickets over regular festival prices during WAF registration and their entries per project submission! All you have to do is to upgrade your World Architecture Community membership to Professional here or visit your WAC Settings page and send us ([email protected]) an email to get your promo code for your WAF registration!

Top image courtesy of WAF.

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