Dilip da Cunha

Dilip da Cunha is an architect and planner based in Philadelphia and Bangalore, and Adjunct Professor at the Columbia GSAPP. 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 editor of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). His most recent book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. The book has received the 2020 ASLA Honor award and the J.B. Jackson Book Prize.

In 2017, Mathur and Da Cunha initiated a design platform called Ocean of Wetness directed to imaging and imagining habitation in ubiquitous wetness rather than on a land-water surface. In 2017, da Cunha was a joint recipient of a Pew Fellowship Grant, and in 2020 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.