Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu 

By Brad Hoepfner

If you have been paying attention to grad students this semester, a big part of our time goes into the Global Architecture class. Our current projects involve a research paper of 20 pages or so, a small structural project, and then we have a pin up for our thesis on the 8th. Needless to say, this is going to be a rough two weeks. The research paper I decided on was Machu Picchu, during one of Davey’s lectures this year he really got me interested in the site. This current blog will be my thoughts and opinions on Machu Picchu and some of the information I have started to discover.

When I first started to think about Machu Picchu and what actually made the site memorable to me was the stepping terraces cut into the mountains edge. These terraces were used for farming and irrigation and made it so the Incans could survive in such a remote location on top of steep mountain slopes. What I found out very quickly was that Machu Picchu was actually more of a royal estate than anything else. I had to analyze the program of the site and over all it was pretty simple. There were more ceremonial parts than I had first expected, but I started to find out more and more about the Incan’s culture and their rituals as I kept digging deeper and deeper. One big portion of this was how the Incans looked to their surroundings at Machu Picchu. They created different temples and monuments that looked at the phases of the sun, analyzed the stars and moon, even monumental rocks cut in the shape of the mountain they worshipped. And on top of all this the Incans were amazing engineers and stone masons that created a variety of perfectly cut, beautiful structures.

Machu Picchu was only discovered in the early 1900’s and its fame skyrocketed quickly. But sadly, the site attracts a relatively small amount of tourists each year and most of these tourists probably have a career related to architecture in some way or even just an obsession for architecture itself. Now, the locals are offering a different type of experience to the tourists, a spiritual journey where they are able to re live some of the rituals and ceremonies that the Incans may have participated in. The trail leading to Machu Picchu has become at risk to the threat of landslides from overuse and the tourists littering along it. I believe that the current state of Machu Picchu is good overall; by offering different forms of tourism, regulating the Incan trail and the site, and maintaining Machu Picchu itself by UNESCO and the Peruvian government the site has become one of the most well known places around the World and much has been discovered about the Incans themselves by excavating and analyzing Machu Picchu over the last 100 years.