Dilip da Cunha - The Invention of Land: Where Colonization begins by Design
Dilip da Cunha, Columbia University
Thursday, March 19, 2026
4:30 pm, Cummings Lecture Theatre
We live in an all-consuming Ocean of Wetness, a wetness that is everywhere in the air, earth, sea, flora and fauna, precipitating, evaporating, storming, seeping, soaking, transpiring, osmoting, freezing. We are wetness ourselves, our wetness necessary to our existence. However, we do not learn that we live in an Ocean of Wetness. We learn instead that we live on an Earth surface called land that we take for granted as existent and place beyond all difference, assuming that all people experience it. In this talk, I present land as a product of design in an Ocean of Wetness that we fail to acknowledge. It is a design that deploys four design devices: the geometric surface, geometric line, hydrologic cycle, and language of landscape. Together they create and maintain an Earth surface that serves as the ground of observation and habitation. It also serves as the ground of a colonization that continues largely because this act of design passes unnoticed and unquestioned. What does it take to acknowledge land to be a product of design; to recognize that our real home is in an Ocean of Wetness that is everywhere rather than on an Earth surface with water somewhere? Does Ocean offer an appreciation of more fundamental difference in culture; and does it open fresh possibilities for design in the face of climate change that threatens land with destruction?
Hosted by Amrit Phull
Dilip da Cunha is an architect who teaches at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. 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). In 2019, his book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2017, Mathur and Da Cunha were awarded a Pew Fellowship Grant and in 2021, the Mercedes T. Bass Landscape Architects in Residence Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. In 2020, da Cunha was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is currently working on a prequel to The Invention of Rivers titled
The Arriscraft Canada Brick Speaker Series at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture brings leading voices from architecture and design to share insights, ideas, and innovations shaping the built environment. This lecture series fosters dialogue between professionals, students, and the community, offering a platform for discussions on contemporary architectural practice. All lectures are free and open to the general public
