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Ocean of Wetness
It Is Where Design Begins
Speaker
We live in an all-consuming wetness that is everywhere in the air, earth, seas, flora and fauna. It precipitates, evaporates, storms, seeps, soaks, transpires, osmotes, condenses. We exist in this ‘Ocean’ as wet stuff ourselves, our wetness necessary to our existence. However, we are not educated to inhabit this Ocean. We are rather educated to inhabit an Earth with a surface of land served by water confined to a place behind a line. This surfaced Earth, we suggest, is the outcome of a design project intent on making an object that benefits a few at the cost of the many, an object that serves science, civilization and cities, but also colonization and systemic oppression. Today, this Earth is in trouble from climate change, threatened (and violated) by the water it has sought to enslave. It faces sea level rise, floods, increasingly frequent, violent and unpredictable storm events, and the melting of ice caps. To us, these are not problems to solve; they are calls to review a design project that has proved unjust, unwise and disastrous. Does an Ocean of Wetness offer an alternative?
Join us as Prof. Dilip da Cunha lays out an alternative to interpret ‘landscapes’ as a gradient of wetness over the binary of ‘land’ and ‘water’. This talk will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
In collaboration with:
Speaker
Dilip da Cunha
Dilip da Cunha is an architect and planner based in Philadelphia and Bangalore, and Adjunct Professor GSAPP at Columbia University. He is author, with landscape architect 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 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.
