Lecture by Anthony Acciavatti

e-flux Architecture presents “Groundwater Earth,” a lecture by Anthony Acciavatti at e-flux on Tuesday, April 9 at 7pm.

“Groundwater Earth” tells the hidden history of the largest distributed mass of freshwater on the planet. The fruits of groundwater are all around us: Nearly half the global population drinks it and over half of all crops are irrigated with it. Groundwater extraction technologies are as significant to farms and cities as the elevator was to the early twentieth-century American metropolis. This talk traces the preposterous, practical, and perilous experiments with groundwater. It focuses on the Indo-Gangetic plains and Sonoran Desert—two major sites of experimentation with groundwater extraction since the nineteenth century. Combining over a decade of fieldwork in the Americas and Asia, with archival research undertaken in three continents and vast amounts of data collected using remote sensing satellites, “Groundwater Earth” examines the scales and slow-motion impacts of groundwater extraction on the tilt of the earth to the shape of cities and farms.

“Grounwater Earth” is presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures, a monthly series inviting researchers and practitioners to discuss timely issues in contemporary architecture, theory, culture, and technology.

Anthony Acciavatti works at the intersection of landscape and the history of science and technology. He is the author of Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River (2015), which is the first comprehensive mapping and environmental history of the Ganges River Basin in over half a century. 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 second book Building a Republic of Villages, will be published next year. In February 2024, his exhibition Groundwater Earth: The World Before and After the Tubewell opened at the Yale Architecture Gallery. Acciavatti is the inaugural Diana Balmori Assistant Professor at Yale University, where he teaches in both the School of Architecture and the School of the Environment.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility                    
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.         
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.                  
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.