In autumn 2002, Anthony Acciavatti arrived in Rome for one year to study the city and many lives of the Tiber River. Spending most days walking and sketching its hydraulic architecture, he developed a romance for rivers and cities. Since then, he has gone on to study major rivers, from the Ganges to the Mississippi, to develop new ways of visualizing and historicizing environmental uncertainty. Now, after more than two decades, he returned to Italy to study the hidden front line of climate change: groundwater. The fruits of groundwater are all around us: half the global population drinks it, and over half of all crops are irrigated with it. Most access to groundwater is done by mechanized wells, known as tubewells, which are largely privately owned. Anthony is writing a book about how cities, from Rome to New Delhi and Mexico City to Jakarta, depend on groundwater for their survival. While in Italy, he has been studying different systems of water management and how they might offer clues for better integrating groundwater as a collective resource to shape public space and life.

Anthony Acciavatti works at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and the history of science and technology. 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, Yale University, Harvard University, and Columbia University. In 2012, he co-founded Manifest: A Journal of the Americas and is a partner in Somatic Collaborative. Since 2018 he has been teaching at Yale University, where he is the Diana Balmori Assistant Professor.