At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero by Stella Nair (review)

The Incas were among the greatest builders in the ancient world. This book represents a sustained and subtle inquiry into one of their greatest constructions—the lavish royal estate built by the ruler Topa Inca (b. 1408?— 1493) at Chinchero, Peru, a vast complex still largely intact and unreconstructed.

Nair’s inquiry is an “attempt at reqsiy, the Quechua word meaning ‘to know a place or people’” (1). This inquiry involved careful and nuanced documentation of the architectural remains at Chinchero, as well as a wide-ranging use of historical, ethnographical, and linguistic data. Nair describes her approach as ideographic—rooted in phenomenology, attentive to architecture as three-dimensional space, and “highlighting the ways people create and transform their spaces to give meaning to their world” (6). Although all human societies engage in this recursive practice, the Incas were particularly skilled and subtle in their creation of space, in many cases conveying messages about power and place. “By incorporating in their architecture the understandings of seeing, hearing, touching, and tasting the material world,” Nair writes, “the Inca conveyed a message that spoke of their close relationship with nature and their power over their subjects” (31).

Four concepts are central to Nair’s analysis—facture (the process of making), materiality (especially the sacred qualities of stone that linked constructions to landscape), patronage (the political relationships implicated in the construction of a royal estate), and spatial practice (the “ability to make subtle yet deeply meaningful architectural gestures that transformed the experience of place” [7].) Nair applies these concepts to specific components of Chinchero’s built environment—Pirca/Wall, Pacha/Place and Time, Pampa/Plaza, Puncu/Doorway, Uasi/House, Pata/Platform, and Llacta/Community.

During this exploration, Nair discovers numerous insights into Inca architecture. For example, the Incas used a basic rectangular unit to enclose a single interior space with a doorway on one long wall—a modular construction that could be replicated and combined into buildings with different uses and adapted to different landscapes. The form of Inca buildings did not follow function. The Incas manipulated place and time at Chinchero, constructing “grand roads and intimate pathways to create distinct and increasingly exclusive theatrical experiences for visitors and inhabitants” (63). Open air spaces were essential elements in Inca settlements. The largest spaces—the pampa—were areas where religious and political ceremonies and spectacles were performed, “an autocratic theater that attempted to control the visitor’s experience and create hierarchies among participants” (86). Doorways confined movements and defined what could be seen and experienced. Although much of Chinchero was designed to impress, there were also pragmatic problems, such as matters of sewage disposal that Nair tackles in the discussion of the aca huasi or “excrement house.” Finally, Nair discusses the changes imposed on Chinchero by the Spaniard invaders, including the “violence of the grid” (179).

Nair’s book is an important contribution to Andean scholarship, demonstrating that a nuanced appreciation of architectural space can result in surprising insights about an ancient culture.