Dilip da Cunha

Architect, Urban Planner, Professor

Master Faculty | Visiting & Regular Faculty

Dilip da Cunha, an architect and planner, is Adjunct Professor at the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. He is also Visiting Faculty at Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology in Bangalore. In collaboration with his partner Anuradha Mathur he is author of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (Yale University Press, 2001), Deccan Traverses: the Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006) and Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (Delhi: NGMA and Rupa & Co., 2009), and most recently co-editor of Design in the Terrain of Water (A+RD Publishers, San Francisco, 2014).

An underlying thread in Mathur and da Cunha’s work is a concern for how water is visualized and engaged in ways that lead to conditions of its excess and scarcity, but also the opportunities that its fluidity offers for new visualizations of terrain, design imagination, and design practice. This concern has also guided their teaching and design studios, more recently in Mumbai, Jerusalem, and the Western Ghats of India. In 2013/2014 they were invited to lead a PennDesign Team for a yearlong project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, focused on the east coast of United States, titled Structures of Coastal Resilience.