Anuradha Mathur (1960-2022)

Landscape Architect, Professor

Anuradha Mathur, an architect and landscape architect, was a Professor in the Landscape Architecture Department, University of Pennsylvania. She passed away on 27th February in Philadelphia, 2022 at the age of 61.

Together with her partner Dilip da Cunha, they have authored books like 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-editors 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.