Monograph Digital Methods Mathur/da Cunha Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha are the principal architects of the

design firm Mathur/da Cunha, based in Philadelphia and Bangelor. Biography: Dilip da Cunha B.Arch., Bangalore University (1982) Master of Housing, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi (1984) M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1989) Ph.D. in Planning Theory, University of California, Berkeley (1996) [http://www.design.upenn.edu/people/da-cunha_dilip] Biography: Anuradha Mathur B.Arch., School of Architecture, Ahmedabad (1986) M.L.A., University of Pennsylvania (1991) Associate Professor and Associate Chair, of the Landscape Architecture Department. An underlying thread in Mathurs 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. In April, 2011 she conceived and curated an international symposium titled In the Terrain of Water, at PennDesign. (http://terrain.design.upenn.edu). She is currently organizing an afternoon of conversations pursuing the themes and questions raised during the Terrain of Water symposium of 2011 on April 9, 2012 (3 7pm). [http://www.design.upenn.edu/people/mathur_anuradha] Mathur and da Cunha are princlipals in the design firm Mathur/da Cunha located in Philadelphia and Bangalore. They are aslo co-authors of SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary (Rupa & Co., 2009), Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalores Terrain (Rupa & Co., 2006) and Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (Yale University Press, 2001). Their work has also been recognized with a 2000 Young Architects Award. Together, Mathur and da Cunha have focused their design and artistic abilities on cultural and ecological issues affecting controversial terrains. Mathur and da Cunhas work focuses on natural landscapes and the layering of current and deeply buried history of each site. Their travels have taken them across many landscapes including Mississippi, New York, Sundarbans, Bangalore, Mumbai and Jerusalem. Mathur and da Cunha describe their design process as beginning ...with an appreciation for landscape as a shifting, living, material phenomenon.1 In their practice they push for ideas and strategies that are ...adaptive to changing
1

(Mathur et al. 2000, 2)

conditions...such as wetness and dryness, erosion and deposition, occupation and abandonment.2 With the concept of shifting landscapes, Mathur and da Cunha set out to find working images both professional and popular representations that demonstrate the everyday use of the land throughout its inhabitation. Images such as surveys, maps, histories, and even folklore are used to guide their investigations. With the use of these images Mathur and da Cunha state, Our work then ranges from new representation of landscapes to making projects that allow for elusiveness within the public realm.3 In an interview with Sanjukta Sen and Nicholas Pevzner, Mathur and da Cunha describe their practice as an activist practice in which they are the initiators in the design opposed to waiting for a commission. A lot of their practice is based questioning how people visualize landscapes and how they may influence change as well as affecting how people image and imagine environments, both built and natural.4 The limitations of commissioned works as interventions are that the approach is limited to preconceived views or precedents. In the case of their past works such as Mississippi Floods and Deccan Traverses, it was the natural disaster that challenged the pair to reconstruct the engagement with the landscape, which many times had become invisible to those who inhabited them. The couple states From Mississippi Floods to Deccan Traverses to SOAK, we have been singularly concerned with revealing and probing lines of demarcation and categories, lines which can be literal or conceptual such as the lines between city and river, urban and rural, formal and informal, infrastructure and landscape, land and sea, among many others. And we question the tendency to understand and visualize these categories as separate before they are related, distinct before they are united. Mathur and da Cunhas process involves separating out the many layers that build up a landscape that is then transferred into screen prints. These layers can be seen in the Deccan Traverses. Mathur and da Cunha start by researching and building the foundation for the landscape. As seen in The Picture of Bangalore, the premise is set from a painting by Thomas Daniell. The painting is not just a picture of what is real but a representation because it is similar to what is real, but there is room for interpretation. The familiar aspects that make up the painting serve the purpose more so as a travel log, a journey that has already been taken. High Ground: The waters coming off the two sides of the Bangalore ridge flow initially through a series of tanks. They eventually reach the Bay of Bengal . In the late 1800s this divide was overcome at a place called High Ground.

2 3

(Mathur et al. 2000, 2) (Mathur et al. 2000, 2) 4 (Pevzner, & Sen )

Mantap: Watchtowers: In the nineteenth century travelers to Bangalore were told that to obtain some of the best glimpses...of the beautiful surroundings of Bangalore, they would need to seek the high grounds marked by lookouts. The two flights of steps hewn in the rock invite a movement that includes the mantap in a circumambulatory (ability to walk all the way around) Outcrop: Quarrying begins by heating the rock surface causing it to expand and crack along the weak planes. The Lalbagh Rock, one of the many prodigious outbursts of the nether-formed rocks of the mysore Tableland was declared a national monument in 1975 These stone quarries continue to be an endless source for research. The marks on the Lalbagh Rock...provide a glimpse of the hyperactivity through which this rock was formed and continues to transform today. Fourth Island: Fourth Island: The Kaveri, which collects the waters of the Vrishabhavati, believed to originate in the Bull Temple in Bangalore, pivots on the island of Sivasamudra. It transitions at this point from a meandering stream on the surface of a plateau at Talakad to a torrential river within the gorges of Mekedatu. Through meander, the river deposis on an inner bend and erodes the outer bend, thereby gradually changing course. This bend acknowledges all four cardinal diretions - north, south, east, west - in a magnificent sweep. Mississippi floods is based on the great flood of 1993 that spread across the American Midwest and over 10,000 square miles of land. This flood was considered by the USGS to be on of the most costly and devistating floods in Americas history. Mathur and da Cunha took on the project viewing the mississippi mud not as an object that could be taimed but as a living phenomenon. The reaction to the flood had two sides, one being controlling the river, and the other withdrawling from the flood plan. Mathur and da Cunha found the common ground of these views as the basis for their investigation. Mathur and da Cunha methods introduce a new way of seeing landscapes and uncovering what might not be obvious. They stumble upon sites, follow leads and collect material to form an understanding of each location. The process includes map prints, screen prints, layering and erasing information, photo-transects (photomontages that bring together the maps and horizons of the journey) historical maps, line drawings, and paintings. All of these techniques and resources guide the journey for discovery beyond the surface. The couples screen prints begin to collage the different aspects of a given site calling out importing factors that played a part in the locations history. Each screen print uses multiple layers of drawings, maps, photographs, and textures to create a cohesive print.

Sources: Mathur, Anuradha, and Dilip daCunha. Mississippi Floods. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. (accessed March 30, 2012). Mathur, Anuradha, and Dilip daCunha. Deccan Traverse: The Making of Bangalore's Terrain. New Delhi: Rupa Co., 2005. (accessed March 30, 2012). Mathur, Anuradha, and Dilip daCunha. Young Architects: Second Nature. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. (accessed March 30, 2012). Pevzner, Nicholas, & Sen , Sanjukta . "Preparing Ground: An Interview with Anuradha Mathur Dilip da Cunha." The Design Observer Group. http://places.designobserver.com/feature/preparing-ground-an-interviewwith-anuradha-mathur-and-dilip-da-cunha/13858/ (accessed March 30, 2012). Mathur, Anuradha, & da Cunha, Dilip. "Design in the Terrain of Water." The University of Pennslyvania School of Design. http://terrain.design.upenn.edu/theme (accessed March 30, 2012).