Anthony Acciavatti

Anthony Acciavatti is the inaugural Diana Balmori Associate Professor in the Yale School of Architecture. He works at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and the history of science and technology.  Acciavatti 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 ten years 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 Wellcome Collection in London, Nehru Science Museum in Mumbai, Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, Harvard University, and Columbia University. 

His forthcoming book, Building A Republic of Villages, examines the histories of science and environmental design in South Asia since the late nineteenth century.  He is a founding editor of Manifest: A Journal of the Americas and currently leads Ganges Lab at Collaborative Earth.

For more on his work: https://taplink.cc/anthonyacciavatti_sc