Anthony Acciavatti

This book examines how reading, writing and criticism can address the urgent issues faced by architecture as it is practiced, taught and studied today. The publication is drawn from an international public symposium organized in the spring of 2017 by the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. From Crisis to Crisis reflects Hong Kong's ongoing transformation from a gateway between China and the world, to a regional hub opening up a new milieu for the cultural, economic, and intellectual resources of Asia. The HKU Department of Architecture is part of this ongoing transformation, attracting thinkers from Asia, North America, Australia and Europe to engage in critical, relevant dialogues. The publication reflects this diversity and is characterized by its flexibility, contingency, vitality, and open-endedness. With contributions by Anthony Acciavatti, Chris Brisbin, Sony Devabhaktuni, Françoise Fromonot, Seng Kuan, Xiaoxuan Lu, Jonathan Massey, Graham Brenton Mckay, Kamran Afshar Naderi, Angelika Schnell, Eunice Seng, Nasrine Seraji, Zhi Wenjun, Tao Zhu, Seraji, Zhi Wenjun

Beyond the dense urbanism of Mumbai (Bombay) and the technology centres of Bangalore and Hyderabad lies the GangesRiver basin: a fertile alluvial plain of 1.1 million square kilometres in area, which is today home to over one-quarter of India'sbillion-plus population. While most of the basin sits within India, it extends into present day Bangladesh, Nepal, and Tibet. Notonly is the area one of the most densely populated river basins in the world, but every year it also undergoes radical physicalchanges. With the arrival of the southwest monsoon between late-June and late-August, over one metre of rainfall drenchesnorthern India. And, what is more, despite these drastic seasonal changes and population density, the basin remainsagriculturally productive. This book focuses on the overlaps and juxtapositions of these three conditions: Population Density -Monsoon - Agriculture. It is an atlas of built and unbuilt projects designed to transform the Ganges River basin. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, this watercourse has functioned as a laboratory to test and build a new civilisation around the culture of water management. Jointly authored by human actors and their shifting natural heritage, the Ganges River basin is today a machine in which the entire basin functions as a highly engineered hydrological super-surface. This surface has been constructed from innumerable interventions operating at vastly different scales - from massive state-sponsored canals toindividually-drilled wells. Because of the mixture of actors, the scale of inhabitation, and the widely varying techniques ofinterventions, this landscape of infrastructure requires a different kind of map. Reaching through the very heart of some of India's most densely populated cities, small towns, industrial zones, sacred sites, and mountainous forests, Ganges Water Machine by Anthony Acciavatti, composed of eight years of field and archival research, explores and theorises about the people and infrastructures that shaped this territory. Ganges Water Machine is an atlas of the enterprise to make the Ganges River basin into a highly engineered landscape: it reveals the narratives and explanations that allowed engineers and planners to realise fantasies previously only imaginable on paper or in myth.