Mapping the Ganges, mile by mile: A new showcase of a Yale architect’s decade-long journey

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.)

When he was done, he produced “Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River” (Applied Research & Design), a dynamic atlas that combined fieldwork with archival research to provide the first comprehensive mapping and environmental history of the Ganges River Basin in a half century. The book, published in 2015, was awarded the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, which recognizes books pertaining to landscape studies.

Then, in 2023, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London acquired the materials and instruments he’d created while studying the basin. Last month, a new exhibition based on these items and on his work went on view at the V&A East, a newly opened expansion of the museum. The show, “Ganges Water Machine,” includes his original drawings, models, sketchbooks, instruments, and photographs.

In a recent conversation with Yale News, Acciavatti reflected on the mapping project, discussing his efforts to document the world’s largest temporary city, his use of photographic panoramas to capture the basin’s diversity, and the unexpected role tube socks played in his data gathering.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What does it mean to you to see your instruments and other materials in the V&A’s permanent collection and now on exhibit at the new V&A East?

Anthony Acciavatti: It still hasn’t fully hit me. It’s very meaningful to me. The V&A’s collection has been important to my education and aesthetic experience. I never imagined that my handmade instruments would take on a life of their own. I was so close to them while I was making and using them to map the river. I knew I was often grasping at straws while trying to figure out how to visualize this vast river basin. So, it feels strangely affirming to see them on display.

The show features panoramic mosaic composed of photos you took of people and places along the Ganges. How did the use of photography in this way contribute to your study of the river basin?

Acciavatti: I now have more than 37,000 photos from the Ganges River Basin. I’ve made panoramas to represent the incredible amount of life that exists along the edges from the glacier in the Himalayas all the way through the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Maps, which are usually drawn from histories of colonialism and imperialism, are intended to flatten space. In my work, I’m always trying to think about how to provide a thicker visual interpretation of the world around us. Panoramas help me to do that.

The large panorama on display at the V&A East consists of about 2,600 photos to give viewers a sense of the diversity of spaces and the ways that people, plants, and wildlife inhabit them. It doesn’t make the river basin more legible, but I think it makes it thicker or more multidimensional.

The materials on view include a soiled tube sock in a resealable plastic bag. What’s the story there?

Acciavatti: I had lived in the city of Allahabad, also known as Prayagraj, which is one of the most sacred sites in Hinduism because it’s where the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers meet. It’s amazing to go there because you see the blue waters of the Yamuna mixing with the brown waters of the Ganges. It’s almost like when you see freshwater and saltwater meet, but it’s even more vivid in terms of the color contrast. But when you look carefully, the reason that these two rivers are different colors is because they have two very different sediment regimes. We see water coming together, but it’s distinct geological provinces that are meeting. It’s all those tectonic crumbs shed from the Himalayas. 

I became focused on the ways in which soils shift across this landscape. I knew I couldn’t bring soils back to the United States. Instead, I used white tube socks to collect samples and note the difference in sediments’ colors. I’d take them out of the plastic sleeve they came in. Then I’d put them on once I was at a point where I was going to put my feet into the silt. By dipping hundreds of different pairs of socks into the river, I developed a way of visualizing at a visceral level the relationship between soil and water and its choreography. It’s kind of beautiful to see these different soils and colors on those socks. You really get a sense of a very different interpretation and visualization of the flows of soils carried by water. 

One of the instruments you made, which you called a “surface accumulation sleeve,” resembles something one might see in a makeshift Halloween costume. What purpose did it serve?

Acciavatti: That’s a device that I made to collect soils from the edges of riverbanks. I rigged up a sleeve that I could wear on my right arm and sort of shoot transparent packing tape from it the way that Spider-Man slings webs from his wrist. I would walk perpendicular to the riverbank edge in the months before the monsoon and collect soils on the tape. I’d shoot the tape and pat it down on the soil for a kilometer. I did this because the particle size of the soil tells you a lot about how the river expands and contracts over the course of the year. So larger sediment means it’s moving faster because it needs to have a higher velocity and volume to move large particulate matter versus smaller particulate matter.

I did this several hundred times, collecting several hundred kilometers of packaging tape to make these do-it-yourself datasets that were more accurate than satellite imagery, which is very low resolution. I used the datasets to draw maps, which the V&A also acquired, in which varied tones of violet show how the river expands and contracts over the course of a year.

You also mapped what you’ve described as the world’s largest temporary city, erected annually along the banks at the confluence of three rivers: the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the Saraswati. What drew you to that project? 

Acciavatti: Every January and February during the Hindu month of Magh, a massive temporary tent city is built in Prayagraj to accommodate pilgrims, who have come to bathe where the three rivers meet. It’s an incredible transformation. The city is laid out on a grid with avenues and streets. It has infrastructure like power and water lines, police departments, and hospitals. A system of pontoon bridges allows pilgrims to navigate the shoals.

What’s more amazing to me than this city designed in the lap of the river is that all the tents are removed once the religious festival ends, but the avenues and the footprints of the tents remain tattooed on the sandbars and shoals. Then farmers move in and plant crops because the silt is so rich in nutrients and the water table is so close to the surface. After the harvest, the monsoons come and inundate the whole area, washing everything away. It’s the most intelligent use of space that I’ve ever seen because every year it goes from urban to agrarian to inundated and back to urban. From a public health perspective, it raises concerns. But it’s really the most amazing agro-urban, mixed-use space I’ve ever encountered.

It also had never been mapped before. And if those spaces aren’t drawn, then how do we build on these intelligent uses of the deep rhythms of the monsoons? The drawings that I made, which the V&A has acquired, have been published by the United Nations as examples of how it is possible to draw cities, not just biophysically, but also to capture the ways they change over time and visualize their political and sacred geographical dimensions, too.

When you reflect on the time you spent studying the river basin, what comes to mind? 

Acciavatti: When I give lectures and show embarrassing photos of me wearing a knock-off Texas Longhorns cap that I bought near the Nepali border while hiking near a glacier, it hits me that it was all a crazy adventure. I felt like a mix of Don Quixote and Dora the Explorer. But I do miss it.

Most people in India and certainly in the United States wondered why I would put so much effort into studying the river. As I write in “Ganges Water Machine,” many people I met in cities like New Delhi thought it was a fool’s errand. In a way, that gave me the freedom to pursue the research without the pressure of oversight. It was often a lot of fun, but also very hard work. I would walk great lengths and sometimes sleep on boats. Occasionally, villagers would invite me to stay with them in their mud huts. It was an extraordinary moment.

But it also was a moment years before drones were in widespread use. Google Earth was extremely low resolution. There were no smartphones. I think it would be harder to write a successful application for a Fulbright grant today to do the same work, although I think there’s still so much value in walking the land and engaging with people you meet and learning more from the spaces you visit.

This approach to fieldwork extends to my annual spring seminar, “Labs and Landscapes of the Green Revolution,” which examines the histories of the effort to grow more wheat and rice to keep pace with population growth in the middle decades of the 20th century. Scholars have long examined the political, economic, environmental, and social legacies of this color-coded revolution. However, we begin by asking what the revolution tasted like. Along with weekly readings and assignments that involve eating and cooking, we travel to India — one of the Green Revolution’s major laboratories and landscapes.

For more information about Yale activities in South Asia, visit the Yale and the World website.