Inca Architecture and Construction at Ollantaytambo


Book Description

This architectural study attempts to explain how the Incas, who did not have iron tools or a knowledge of the wheel, were able to mine and transport extremely heavy stone and rock, following which these materials were converted into remarkably large structures.




The Inca World


Book Description

This lavishly illustrated volume, based on extensive archeological research and Spanish colonial documentation, provides important insights into many questions and contradictions regarding the Inca Empire. 337 illustrations, 106 in color. 12 maps.




At Home with the Sapa Inca


Book Description

By examining the stunning stone buildings and dynamic spaces of the royal estate of Chinchero, Nair brings to light the rich complexity of Inca architecture. This investigation ranges from the paradigms of Inca scholarship and a summary of Inca cultural practices to the key events of Topa Inca's reign and the many individual elements of Chinchero's extraordinary built environment. What emerges are the subtle, often sophisticated ways in which the Inca manipulated space and architecture in order to impose their authority, identity, and agenda. The remains of grand buildings, as well as a series of deft architectural gestures in the landscape, reveal the unique places that were created within the royal estate and how one space deeply informed the other. These dynamic settings created private places for an aging ruler to spend time with a preferred wife and son, while also providing impressive spaces for imperial theatrics that reiterated the power of Topa Inca, the choice of his preferred heir, and the ruler's close relationship with sacred forces. This careful study of architectural details also exposes several false paradigms that have profoundly misguided how we understand Inca architecture, including the belief that it ended with the arrival of Spaniards in the Andes. Instead, Nair reveals how, amidst the entanglement and violence of the European encounter, an indigenous town emerged that was rooted in Inca ways of understanding space, place, and architecture and that paid homage to a landscape that defined home for Topa Inca.




Incamisana


Book Description

Wright and his coauthors analyze and explain the masterful design of the Incamisana, which incorporates hydraulic works into an aesthetically pleasing ceremonial complex as part of the royal estate of Ollantaytambo.




Model Perspectives: Structure, Architecture and Culture


Book Description

This book contains a unique collection of various perspectives on the relationship between structures and the forms and spaces of architecture. As such it provides students and professionals alike with an essential sourcebook that can be mined for visual inspiration as well as for textually rich and authoritative insight into the links between structure, architecture, and cultural context. The chapters address fundamental structural elements and systems: columns, walls, beams, trusses, frames, tensile structures, arches, domes and shells. Each chapter is subdivided into two parts: • The essays – introduce the chapters with the reprinting of a curated set of essays and excerpts by various authors that uniquely address how particular structural elements or systems relate in essential fashion to architectural design concepts. • The model studies – physical models of the overall structural systems of several notable contemporary buildings from Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia are illustrated with large photographs, detail close-ups, and views of their external forms and internal spaces that establish the exceptional qualities of these projects in connecting structural form to architectural design objectives. Mosaic layouts complete the chapters with a collection of photographs of yet more models whose particular details and unique features serve to extend the visual repertoire of the structural type being considered. The combination, juxtaposition and mutual positive reinforcement of these two collections, one largely textual and the other image based, provides the reader with unique and multifaceted insights into how structural forms and systems can be related to architectural design intentions. Conveyed by a strong and deliberate graphical design format, this assembly of materials gets to the very essence of structures within the context of architecture, and will inspire students and practitioners alike to make strategic design decisions for their own projects.







The Inka Empire


Book Description

Massive yet elegantly executed masonry architecture and andenes (agricultural terraces) set against majestic and seemingly boundless Andean landscapes, roads built in defiance of rugged terrains, and fine textiles with orderly geometric designs—all were created within the largest political system in the ancient New World, a system headed, paradoxically, by a single, small minority group without wheeled vehicles, markets, or a writing system, the Inka. For some 130 years (ca. A.D. 1400 to 1533), the Inka ruled over at least eighty-six ethnic groups in an empire that encompassed about 2 million square kilometers, from the northernmost region of the Ecuador–Colombia border to northwest Argentina. The Inka Empire brings together leading international scholars from many complementary disciplines, including human genetics, linguistics, textile and architectural studies, ethnohistory, and archaeology, to present a state-of-the-art, holistic, and in-depth vision of the Inkas. The contributors provide the latest data and understandings of the political, demographic, and linguistic evolution of the Inkas, from the formative era prior to their political ascendancy to their post-conquest transformation. The scholars also offer an updated vision of the unity, diversity, and essence of the material, organizational, and symbolic-ideological features of the Inka Empire. As a whole, The Inka Empire demonstrates the necessity and value of a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates the insights of fields beyond archaeology and ethnohistory. And with essays by scholars from seven countries, it reflects the cosmopolitanism that has characterized Inka studies ever since its beginnings in the nineteenth century.




A Culture of Stone


Book Description

A major contribution to both art history and Latin American studies, A Culture of Stone offers sophisticated new insights into Inka culture and the interpretation of non-Western art. Carolyn Dean focuses on rock outcrops masterfully integrated into Inka architecture, exquisitely worked masonry, and freestanding sacred rocks, explaining how certain stones took on lives of their own and played a vital role in the unfolding of Inka history. Examining the multiple uses of stone, she argues that the Inka understood building in stone as a way of ordering the chaos of unordered nature, converting untamed spaces into domesticated places, and laying claim to new territories. Dean contends that understanding what the rocks signified requires seeing them as the Inka saw them: as potentially animate, sentient, and sacred. Through careful analysis of Inka stonework, colonial-period accounts of the Inka, and contemporary ethnographic and folkloric studies of indigenous Andean culture, Dean reconstructs the relationships between stonework and other aspects of Inka life, including imperial expansion, worship, and agriculture. She also scrutinizes meanings imposed on Inka stone by the colonial Spanish and, later, by tourism and the tourist industry. A Culture of Stone is a compelling multidisciplinary argument for rethinking how we see and comprehend the Inka past.




The Stones of Tiahuanaco


Book Description

The world's most artful and skillful stone architecture is found at Tiahuanaco at the southern end of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. The precision of the stone masonry rivals that of the Incas to the point that writers from Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth century to twentieth-century authors have claimed that Tiahuanaco not only served as a model for Inca architecture and stone masonry, but that the Incas even imported stonemasons from the Titicaca Basin to construct their buildings. Experiments aimed at replicating the astounding feats of the Tiahuanaco stonecutters--perfectly planar surfaces, perfect exterior and interior right angles, and precision to within 1 mm--throw light on the stonemasons' skill and knowledge, especially of geometry and mathematics. Detailed analyses of building stones yield insights into the architecture of Tiahuanaco, including its appearance, rules of composition, canons, and production, filling a significant gap in the understanding of Tiahuanaco's material culture.




Understanding Architecture


Book Description

This widely acclaimed, beautifully illustrated survey of Western architecture is now fully revised throughout, including essays on non-Western traditions. The expanded book vividly examines the structure, function, history, and meaning of architecture in ways that are both accessible and engaging.