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= Inca Architecture =

Aesthetic: Combining the Built and Natural Environments
Inca architecture is strongly characterized by its use of the natural environment. The Inca managed to seamlessly merge their architecture into the surrounding land and its specificities. At its peak, the Inca Empire spanned from Ecuador to Chile and Argentina. Yet despite geographic variances, Inca architecture remained consistent in its ability to visually blend the built and natural environment.

In particular, Inca walls practiced mortarless masonry and used partially worked, irregularly shaped rocks to complement the organic qualities and diversity of the natural environment. Through the dry fitted masonry techniques of caninacukpirca, the Incas shaped their stone to conceal natural outcrops, fit tight crevices, and ultimately incorporate the landscape into their infrastructure.

The Inca also used natural bedrock as their structural foundations. This pragmatically stabilized their structures built in the Andes mountain range of South America, while aesthetically disguising the boundaries between mountain and edifice. In combination, the diversity of stone shape, materiality, and facture all furthered the naturalistic illusion of the Inca's built environment.

Politics: Expansionist and Subservient Ideologies
Inca employment and integration of the natural environment into their architecture played an essential role in their program of civilizational expansion and cultural imperialism. Patronage of powerful elites and rulers of the Inca empire was a major impetus behind the construction of Inca structures, and much of the remaining architecture we see today was most likely royal estates or mobile capitals for Sapa Inca to inhabit. The Sapa Inca naturalized and asserted their political rule through their palaces' aesthetic appeal to a reciprocal relationship between their imperialism and the earth itself. The blended, architectural aesthetic colored their political expansion in a sense of inseparable, timeless, and spiritual authority. For example, in the royal estate of Chinchero, the Incas adapted their large-scale earthwork and massive stone construction to the land's dramatically steep valley in order to create intense, visual drama. Similarly to the architecture of other mountainous Inca citadels, such as Machu Picchu, the Chinchero estate's dynamic construction into the severe landscape demonstrated the raw, physical power of the Incas, and projected an authoritative aura for those who approached.

The actual process of constructing the royal palaces served as an additional royal tactic of maintaining rule. Inca architecture demonstrates a commitment to the culturally pervasive, yet more physically difficult, process of mortarless, polygonal masonry and conscious accommodation of a land's natural topography. The upholding of these non-utilitarian practices of construction can give insight into Inca values concerning the artistic integrity and cultural meaning embedded within the process of building estates, and how the building of royal palaces can be understood as a physical enactment of political loyalty and communal subservience to the Sapa Inca.