Anuradha Mathur, Landscape Architecture | University of Pennsylvania Almanac

Anuradha (Anu) Mathur, a professor emeritus of landscape architecture in the Weitzman University of Style and design, handed away on February 28. She was 61. 

Born and raised in India, Prof. Mathur received a BArch in 1986 from the University of Architecture in Ahmedabad, India, then obtained an MLA (master’s diploma in landscape architecture) in 1991 from Penn’s Weitzman University of Layout. 3 many years just after graduating, she joined the faculty of Penn’s landscape architecture section as an assistant professor. In 2003, she was promoted to associate professor, and she turned a complete professor in 2012. At Penn, she taught a collection of studios and programs that challenged Western strategies about wildness, wetness, mother nature, and tradition. On excursions to Mumbai, Jerusalem, and the U.S.-Mexico border, between some others, she challenged her students to feel in another way about the landscape and their purpose as designers. Prof. Mathur was engaged with the Penn community, serving on School Senate and University Council committees for the duration of her full tenure and acquiring College Investigation Basis (URF) grants to analyze landscape architecture adjacent to the Ganges River and to map the flood plains of the Mississippi River. She retired from Penn in the summer of 2021. 

To retain a relationship with her indigenous India, Prof. Mathur co-launched a organization with her husband, Dilip da Cunha. “With soaring seas, flooding towns, polluted rivers, piling wastes, and widening inequalities, we believe that that ubiquitous wetness in place of the land-drinking water binary holds the way forward,” they wrote. “It is an exciting pre-disciplinary floor of style by which we re-articulate the earlier, expertise the current, and imagine the long run.” Prof. Mathur and Dr. da Cunha exhibited all around the entire world and published various textbooks, such as Mississippi Floods: Building a Shifting Landscape (2001) Deccan Traverses: The Earning of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006) and Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009). In 2011 and 2012, they curated In the Terrain of H2o, an worldwide symposium, at the Weitzman College. They received numerous awards, which includes a Pew Fellowship in 2017, which regarded their collaborative function imagining new opportunities for the layout of the built ecosystem and complicated the lines separating land and h2o, city and rural, official and informal environments. 

Prof. Mathur is survived by her husband, Dilip da Cunha, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Scheduling and Preservation. To read quite a few Weitzman School faculty’s remembrances of Prof. Mathur, visit https://www.layout.upenn.edu/news/remembering-anu-mathur.