Lectures
Anthony Acciavatti
Groundwater Earth: The World Before and After the Tubewell
Anthony Acciavatti works at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and the history of science and technology. He is interested in experimental forms of scholarship, pedagogy, and design afforded by humanistic inquiry. He is the author of Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River (Applied Research & Design, 2015), which is the first comprehensive mapping and environmental history of the Ganges River Basin in over half a century. He spent a decade hiking, driving, and boating across the Ganges to map it and to understand the historical conflicts over water for drinking, agriculture, and industry. Combining fieldwork with archival research, the book is an atlas of the enterprise to transform the Ganges into the most hyper-engineered landscape in the world. In 2016 Ganges Water Machine was awarded the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize.
Along with the book, Acciavatti designed his own instruments to map the choreography of soils, cities, and agriculture across the Ganges River basin. In 2023 the Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired these instruments, along with his drawings and photographs, for the permanent collection. His work has been exhibited at the Milan Triennial, biennials in Venice, Seoul, Rotterdam, Quito, as well as at the Nehru Science Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard University, and Columbia University.
Building on nearly two decades worth of research, Acciavatti currently leads Ganges Lab at Collaborative Earth. Composed of a trans-disciplinary group of scientists, engineers, and designers, the lab is developing new forms of civic infrastructure that integrates the rhythms of the monsoons with urban growth and agricultural production.
His scholarly interests include the histories of the environmental sciences along with landscape architecture and engineering since the eighteenth century, including cartography, agriculture, anthropology, and ecology. Recent publications include chapters on the first institute of design in post-independent India, model villages in the Indo-Gangetic plains and Sonoran Desert, temporary cities and agriculture in monsoonal landscapes, and the formation of new scientific disciplines like psychorheology. He is currently completing the manuscript of his next book, Building A Republic of Villages, which looks at the histories of science and environmental design in South Asia since the late-nineteenth century.
Trained in architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and Harvard University, in the history of science at Princeton University, and a Fulbright Scholar in the department of geography and town and country planning at the University of Allahabad, Acciavatti is currently the Diana Balmori Assistant Professor at Yale University. He was the recipient of the Professor King-lui Wu Teaching Award in 2022. His work has been supported by the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University as well as grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, Princeton University, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Prior to his most recent appointment, he was the Daniel Rose (1951) Visiting Assistant Professor in Urban Studies (2019-2022) at Yale, and he has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Columbia University, and Princeton University.
He is a principal of Somatic Collaborative in New York and a founding director of Manifest Institute, which publishes Manifest: A Journal of the Americas. His work and writing have been featured in The New York Times, MOLD, Cabinet, Indian Express, Architectural Design, Harvard Design Magazine, Bracket, and Topos among other places.
