Anthony Acciavatti will be at Labyrinth Books on Thursday, April 28^, at 6 p.m. for a discussion of his new book, Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River, which was awarded the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize for 2016.

Ganges Water Machine is an atlas of the Ganges River basin — the first such comprehensive atlas in half a century. It is based on a decade of fieldwork and archival research begun when the author was a 2005 Fulbright Fellow. Having mapped the Ganges River by foot and boat, Mr. Acciavatti will speak about developing new modes of mapping environmental change and about data visualization. He will also give an account of the intersection of concerns over irrigation, population, geography, and climate. At a time when the Government of India is beginning to invest a $1.5 billion loan from the World Bank to clean up the Ganges River, the book and an accompanying traveling exhibition can serve as a guidebook to better understand and respond to environmental conditions and their social impacts.

Anthony Acciavatti is a historian, an architect, and cartographer. He is the founding editor of Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism. His work has been published in the New York Times, Cabinet, Architectural Design, and Topos among other places. He currently teaches at Columbia University and is a PhD candidate in Princeton’s history department.