When Anthony Acciavatti graduated college in 2004, he set an ambitious goal for himself: map the entire Ganges River Basin.
The Ganges River flows from the Himalayas across India's northern plains and into the Bay of Bengal. Its basin covers an area of more than 320,000 square miles and is home to about 600 million people, making it the world's most densely populated river basin.
"Call it the hubris of youth," said Acciavatti, now the Diana Balmori Associate Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. "But as an architect, I wanted to know more about how people negotiate that density. I wanted to understand the choreography of it and how it responds to the rhythms of the monsoon."
At Yale, Acciavatti works at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and the history of science and technology, including research on how water extraction is reshaping cities and landscapes.
But for nearly a decade, he walked more than 9,000 miles through the ever-changing Ganges river basin, closely studying its soils, waters, landscapes, infrastructure, people, plants, and wildlife. Along the way, he handcrafted an assortment of ingenious instruments to help him collect the data he needed to complete the project. (The work was initially supported by a Fulbright fellowship, and later with a Ford Foundation grant.)
