Thursday, November 2nd, 4-6pm, CHAT, 10th Floor Gladfelter
Anu Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, (Penn School of Design)
"A View across the Maidan: Recovering a Dynamic Landscape"

Describing their talk at Temple's New India seminar, Anu and Dilip note: "We deploy a widely prevalent landscape of the Indian subcontinent – the maidan – as a lens to view places like Bangalore that planners struggle to contain/predict as a city in the global arena. The maidan is a place that defies categorization or rather accommodates it within its open field. Planners and administrators still operating within the colonial tradition of the ‘gazetteer’ rush to fence it as a public space while designers hasten to articulate its spatial structure. But they miss the point: the maidan is not just an object to accommodate in space and time; the maidan is an attitude that accommodates. It is a negotiated settlement that grants landscape an agency that cannot be easily limited. It is an old ground for a new reading of terrains, one that opens a new past, present and future."

Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha are award-winning designers-planners who have focused their expertise for the past decade on cultural and ecological issues of contentious landscapes. Insisting that the landscape is "brown" before it is "green," Mathur and Da Cunha's investigations have taken them to diverse terrains including the Lower Mississippi, New York, Sundarbans, Rio Grande, and Bangalore. They believe that landscapes are shifting, living material phenomena that demand an attitude of negotiation rather than unilateral control. Their mission is to create the ground for this attitude through landscape design, planning, and pioneering research.

Mathur is an architect and landscape architect. She is Associate Professor, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. She has a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Da Cunha is an architect and planner on the faculty at Parsons School of Design, New York and visiting faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. He has a Ph.D from the University of California at Berkeley, a Masters in City Planning from MIT, and a Masters in Housing from SPA, New Delhi.

Mathur and da Cunha are authors of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (Yale University Press, 2001) that looks beyond objectifying the Mississippi as a river, and draws out a more dynamic and layered landscape that demands negotiation more than control. Mississippi Floods also took the form of a public exhibition that traveled extensively in the US and London. Their practice received the Young Architects Award for 2000 given by the Architectural League of New York. Their awarded projects are part of a publication by Princeton Architectural Press and the Architectural League titled Second Nature. They were visiting faculty at Harvard University for the 2001-02 academic year.

Mathur and da Cunha’s most recent book, Deccan Traverses: the Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006), was released to great acclaim in June 2006. It follows a public exhibition held in the Glass House of Lalbagh, Bangalore, in October 2004. The book and exhibition bring together a unique and extensive documentation of Bangalore’s history and landscape agency and are directed toward an innovative design strategy for Bangalore and its extended region.