Places recently started a great series of interviews with innovative landscape architecture thinkers and practitioners. In its most recent interview, two young landscape architects, Sanjukta Sen, James Corner Field Operations, and Nicholas Pevzner, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, talk to Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, principals of the design firm Mathur/da Cunha based in Philadelphia and Bangalore. Mathur is associate chair of landscape architecture at the Penn School of Design and da Cunha is on the faculty of the Parsons School of Design and the Penn School of Design. Places says instead of concentrating on "client-driven commissions," the team is focused on "issue-centered public investigations. They work to identify not conventional solutions but rather a range of possibilities, points of departure for transformative projects."

Some the duo's works include a set of exhibitions and books, including Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001), Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore's Terrain (2006), and most recently, SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009), which is now an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai.

On their most recent public investigation focused on Mumbai and its position within a surrounding estuary, the designers argue that Mumbai's flood control problems are the result of a long history of looking at things a certain way. "We argue that the flooding that occurs with every monsoon is not simply a natural event, or a failure of engineering infrastructure, or a failure of civic vigilance. The flooding is a consequence of this history of visualization, and the constructions that follow. And this reading of the terrain, which is rooted in the city's history, continues on in contemporary interpretations and in visions for the city's future, which perpetuate the idea of an island-city that must do seasonal battle against the waters of both the monsoon and the sea."

Providing a new approach or "visualization" can enable more comprehensive solutions down the road. "We propose imagining — and imaging — the city of Mumbai not as an island periodically attacked by floods but rather as an estuary that will seasonally soak, a place where the sea and the monsoon are perceived not as invaders but as insiders. So our drawings often straddle the worlds of art and information communication; and they are indeed both. For us they are works of art and they are narratives, visual essays about the places we've researched. And though they are not always done with the intention of implementing the project, they do often construct the ground for projects." 

Their design ideas are also meant to stir civic debate: "Here we propose the construction of a network of trenches that would disperse and collect monsoon waters — essentially a return to an older sensibility of accepting that the monsoon will affect large expanses of land, and as such a turn away from current efforts to control and delimit its affects. We don't know how, if at all, one can gauge the impact of the trenches — what transformations they might bring about. But our goal is not only to ameliorate the problem of flooding in Mumbai but also to enhance the civic realm. And even more significantly, we hope to influence how people talk about and think about the seasonal monsoon, so that they would develop again what earlier generations had — an appreciation and even love of the monsoon as intrinsic rather than external to Mumbai's landscape." 

Read the full interview and see a slideshow of their work.

Also, check out Places' previous interview with Matthew Urbanski, the principal landscape architect at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates working on the Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City.

Image credit: Mathur / da Cunha