The 2025 Laurinda Spear 72' Lecture Series
Anthony Acciavatti: Siphoning the Underground
November 18, 2025, 6:00 pm, List 120, Reception to follow
Siphoning the Underground explores the ways in which cities and agricultural landscapes across the globe have come to rely on groundwater for drinking and irrigation. By examining the unintended consequences of over extraction, from sinking cities to contamination, and how they are compounded by the impacts of climate change, we will see how vital this often-invisible source of freshwater is to billions of people. The talk will foreground the delicate hydrological processes that shape aquifers, with a focus on the evolution of two of the most over-extracted landscapes on the planet, South Asia and the American West, and how they came to be laboratories for groundwater extraction since the nineteenth century. Special attention will be given to groundwater challenges in Rhode Island and New England, where saltwater intrusion and contamination pose risks. By foregrounding our thirst for groundwater and increasing vulnerability to over-extraction, the lecture underscores the need to shift our perception of aquifers as a common resource—like the air we breathe—in order to reimagine how deeply affected it is by individual and collective actions.
The 2025 Laurinda Spear 72' Lecture Series on the Visual Arts is co-sponsored by the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and the Department of Visual Art.
About Anthony Acciavatti
Anthony Acciavatti is Diana Balmori Assistant Professor at the Yale University School of Architecture. He works at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and the histories of science and technology. He explores the hidden underworlds of the earth and how they shape the way we live in cities and cultivate landscapes. Acciavatti is the author of the award-winning book, Ganges Water Machine, which is based on nearly a decade of crisscrossing the world’s most densely populated river basin by foot, boat, and car. His work on the Ganges is in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He has exhibited at the Milan Triennial, the Wellcome Collection in London, Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, as well as biennials in Venice, Seoul, Rotterdam, and Quito. Trained in architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and Harvard University, in the history of science at Princeton University, and a Fulbright Scholar in the department of geography and town and country planning at the University of Allahabad, he is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a Senior Fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies. A founding partner of Somatic Collaborative in New York City, Acciavatti currently leads Ganges Field Lab at Collaborative Earth and is the inaugural Diana Balmori Associate Professor at Yale University.
Acciavatti was awarded the Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano/Kate Lancaster Brewster Fellowship in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome (2024-25) and a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (2024-26).
In 2024, he exhibited ongoing research at the Yale School of Architecture on the hidden front lines of climate change: groundwater extraction. Based on nearly two decades of work, Groundwater Earth: The World before and after the Tubewell, investigates how our thirst for water has radically reshaped cities and farms across the world. The exhibition will travel to Asia in 2025. 
In 2025, marking two decades of work in South Asia, Acciavatti will publish The Values of Imprecision: Tools for Navigating Environmental Uncertainty. The book explores the making of instruments to visualize environmental change and their relationship to objects from the histories of science and art.
Building on nearly two decades worth of research, Acciavatti currently leads Ganges Lab at Collaborative Earth. Composed of a trans-disciplinary group of scientists, engineers, and designers, the lab is developing new forms of civic infrastructure that integrates the rhythms of the monsoons with urban growth and agricultural production.
His work and writing have been featured in The New York Times, The Public Domain Review, MOLD, Cabinet, Indian Express, Architectural Design, Harvard Design Magazine, Bracket, and Topos among other places.