The Architecture of Cusco

The architecture of Cusco encompasses the imperial buildings, ceremonial precincts, residential compounds, fortifications, and urban planning of the capital of the Inca state between the early fifteenth century and the Spanish conquest of 1532. Cusco, located in the southeastern Andes of present-day Peru at an elevation of approximately 3,400 meters, was the political, religious, and demographic center of an empire that, on the eve of the conquest, stretched more than 4,000 kilometers along the Andes. The architecture of the city concentrated the imperial building program within a clearly bounded urban core, organized according to a cosmological plan that is conventionally described in the form of a puma, and built using the imperial style of polygonal ashlar masonry. The architecture of Cusco, more than any other corpus, gives form to the political and religious ambitions of the Inca dynasty and remains, in spite of substantial colonial reworking, the most important architectural record of pre-conquest South America.

The Inca capital was the focus of a continuous building program from roughly 1438, when the ninth Sapa Inca, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, completed the military and political consolidation that would make the Inca the largest state in the pre-Columbian Americas, until 1533, when the Spanish occupied the city. The buildings of the city are described in the principal colonial chronicles, including the Relación de los quipucamayos of 1542, the works of Pedro Cieza de León, Bernabé Cobo, and Garcilaso de la Vega, and the archaeological record has been clarified by excavations carried out in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly the Programa Arqueológico Cusco of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture and a long series of international projects.

The urban plan of Cusco

Cusco was laid out in a rectangular plan in conformity with a cosmological concept attributed to Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. The chroniclers report that Pachacuti reorganized the city into the form of a puma lying on its side, with the head at the fortress of Sacsayhuamán, the body in the central city, and the tail at the confluence of the Huatanay and Tullumayo rivers. The design of the city, including the location of the four suyus of the empire within the urban core, is described in detail by the chroniclers, and it has been verified in part by modern surveys of huacas and surviving Inca walls. The puma design of Cusco is a foundational concept in Andean urbanism and reflects a deliberate identification of the imperial capital with the Sinchi, the celestial puma, in a manner that integrates cosmology, zoology, and city planning.

The principal axis of the city was oriented approximately 30 degrees east of true north, so that the main plaza, the Haucaypata, faced the rising sun at the June solstice. The Cusipata, the secondary plaza, was attached to the southern edge of the Haucaypata, and the two open spaces together formed a single ceremonial precinct. The principal temples, the Sun Temple of the Coricancha, the Pumacurco aqueduct, the Muru-kunka waterfall shrine, and the principal royal residences were placed along the lines of sight that radiated from the central plaza. The pattern is consistent with other imperial foundations, including Machu Picchu and Ollantaytambo, and reflects a coordinated imperial aesthetic across the empire.

The residential and administrative units of the city were organized into rectangular blocks, each of which was occupied by a particular lineage, a panaca, or an administrative function. The cells of the urban grid were typically oriented to the cardinal directions, and the most important lineages received the cells closest to the ceremonial center. The Inca state identified and protected a network of huacas within the city, and these sacred places were treated as integral to the urban plan.

The city was divided into two main sectors. The Hanan, or upper, sector occupied the northern and eastern part of the city, while the Hurin, or lower, sector occupied the southern and western part. The Hanan sector was associated with the king, the principal temples, and the administrative functions of the state, while the Hurin sector was associated with the population at large and the hereditary nobility. The two sectors converged on the central plaza and reflected the hanan/hurin duality that is found in many Andean polities.

Sacsayhuamán

The fortress and ceremonial complex of Sacsayhuamán dominates the northern edge of Cusco. It occupies a hilltop ridge that rises roughly 200 meters above the city and was the ceremonial and defensive centerpiece of the imperial capital. The complex is conventionally dated to the mid-fifteenth century, with most construction attributed to the reign of Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui and his successors. Garcilaso de la Vega reports that 20,000 workers participated in its construction and that the building of the fortress was the principal public works project of the late imperial period.

Sacsayhuamán consists of three sequential terraced walls that follow the natural contours of the hill. The lower walls are made of enormous cyclopean blocks, the largest of which is estimated to weigh between 120 and 200 tons. The upper walls are built of smaller, polygonal stones, fitted together with the same precision found elsewhere in the imperial core. The three walls form a zigzag line that crosses the ridge, with projecting bastions that allowed the defenders to direct enfilading fire along the front of the wall. The construction sequence, as clarified by recent archaeological work, suggests that the lower cyclopean course was laid first, with the upper polygonal courses added later, perhaps in the reign of Huayna Capac.

The complex includes the great plaza of Muyu Mork’or or Muyu Murco, an open space used for ceremonial dances and reviews of troops. The plaza is bounded by the lower wall of the fortress on its northern side and by a series of low buildings, including the so-called “throne” of the Inca, a carved stone seat, on its southern side. The complex was partially dismantled in the years following the Spanish conquest of 1533, when many of the smaller stones were used to construct colonial buildings in the city below. The upper towers, which were visible to the chroniclers as a “triple row of towers,” were demolished in the 1530s and 1540s, and the surviving remains are limited to the three great walls and the ceremonial plaza.

The fortress of Sacsayhuamán is interpreted as both a defensive structure and a ceremonial center. Its commanding position, its three great walls, and its capacity to shelter a substantial garrison support the defensive interpretation, while the great plaza and the carved throne point to its ceremonial function. The chronicler Pedro Cieza de León noted that the complex could house more than 5,000 soldiers and that it had an internal system of water supply, storehouses, and administrative buildings. Modern investigations have confirmed the existence of a sophisticated hydraulic system within the complex and of a network of internal structures, including an ushnu, or ceremonial platform, on the upper terrace.

The Coricancha

The Coricancha, or “Golden Enclosure,” was the principal religious precinct of the Inca state. It was dedicated primarily to Inti, the sun god, and to Viracocha, the creator, but it also housed shrines to the moon, the stars, thunder, and the rainbow. The complex included a great central courtyard, temples dedicated to each of the principal deities, a garden of golden plants, fountains, and a room dedicated to the mallquis, the mummified bodies of deceased rulers. The complex was the religious counterpart to the political authority expressed in the fortress of Sacsayhuamán and was the center of the imperial cult.

The Coricancha is known from archaeological remains, from the descriptions of colonial chroniclers, and from the site of the colonial church of Santo Domingo, which was built directly on top of the Inca precinct following the Spanish conquest. The earliest versions of the precinct predate the empire, and excavations in the early twentieth century by the Peruvian archaeologist Luis Valcárcel uncovered earlier walls beneath the polygonal masonry attributed to the Inca. Under Pachacuti, the complex was rebuilt in polygonal ashlar style, and the buildings were encased in gold plates, both flat and embossed, that were stripped by the Spanish in 1533. The recovered gold was sent to Spain and used to pay the Spanish army, the king, and the German banking house of the Welsers.

The great wall that separates the precinct from the surrounding city is one of the most famous Inca walls in existence. It contains many of the most finely cut stones in the imperial corpus, including the curved polygonal walls that mark the corner of the Sun Temple. The curved walls of the Sun Temple are technically the most demanding in the corpus, since the polygonal technique reaches its highest difficulty on a curved surface. The wall contains, in addition, several niches and trapezoidal doorways, and is built in three sections that meet at the corner of the complex. The wall is a national cultural treasure of Peru and a central exhibit in any account of the architecture of Cusco.

The Coricancha included a series of water features, including the Inti-huatana, a fountain associated with the sun, and a system of channels that brought water from the Pumacurco aqueduct to the precinct. The hydraulic infrastructure of the Coricancha was, in effect, a symbolic system: water was led to the precinct from a sacred source on the hillside of Pumacurco and was distributed within the complex in a way that mirrored the cosmological organization of the Inca state. The system was dismantled after the conquest, and the surviving channels are now embedded in the colonial fabric of the city.

The imperial walls and the puma design

The imperial walls of Cusco, including those of the Coricancha, the Hatunrumiyoc palace, the Acllahuasi, the Amarucancha, and the colonial-era buildings that incorporate Inca foundations, are characterized by a high degree of refinement in the cutting of the stones and by the use of the polygonal ashlar technique. The most famous stone in the imperial corpus is the Twelve-Angled Stone, a single block of green diorite fitted into a wall of the Hatunrumiyoc palace on Calle Hatunrumiyoc. The stone has twelve interior angles and thirteen exterior sides, each fitted precisely against its neighbors, and is one of the most photographed Inca stones in existence. The wall in which the stone is set contains many stones of comparable complexity, including examples with nine, ten, and eleven sides, and the wall as a whole is a remarkable demonstration of the imperial building program.

The puma design of Cusco is the cosmologically significant urban plan attributed to Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. The chroniclers report that Pachacuti reshaped the city to look like a puma lying on its side, with the head at the fortress of Sacsayhuamán, the body in the central city, and the tail at the confluence of the Huatanay and Tullumayo rivers. Within this zoomorphic frame, the chroniclers associate the fortress with the head and jaw of the puma, the Pumacurco aqueduct with the spine, the central Sun Temple at the Coricancha with the navel or heart, and outlying huacas such as Pumacurco and Rumiqolqa with other anatomical features. The design reflected a cosmological understanding of the city’s role as a microcosm of the empire and as a center of the Andean world, and the puma continues to be the symbol of Cusco in the modern period.

The legacy of the imperial city

The Spanish rebuilt Cusco on top of the Inca city following the conquest of 1533. The colonial authorities preserved the principal Inca walls as foundations for new buildings, but they demolished the imperial temples and palaces and replaced them with churches, convents, and the residences of the Spanish elite. The colonial authorities took advantage of the dismantling of the Inca city to extract a substantial quantity of dressed stone for use in the new construction, and the resulting destruction was one of the most extensive in the colonial period. Despite this, the imperial walls of Cusco survive in remarkable density, and the city is the most important repository of imperial Inca architecture in existence.

Cusco was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983, and the city has been the subject of intensive conservation work since the twentieth century. The 1950 earthquake of 21 May 1950, which measured approximately 6.0 on the Richter scale, demonstrated the seismic resilience of the Inca walls, in contrast to the colonial buildings above them, and prompted a renewed interest in mortarless construction and in the conservation of imperial buildings. The architecture of Cusco, in spite of substantial colonial reworking and seismic damage, remains the most complete record of the imperial building program of the Inca state and a foundational element of the Andean architectural tradition.