Nestled in Peru’s Sacred Valley, the Maras Salt Mine provides a living link to the Incans, though its origins go back further still. This tapestry of terraced pools, an infrastructure for sluicing and drying the mine’s briny effluent, is an emblematic case for the study of urgent contemporary questions around heritage, tourism, and ecological and cultural justice.
This salt mine is managed by a local community of 600 families who maintain its traditional practices and rely on it for their economic well-being. It has recently been protected as a national landmark, setting in motion conflicting visions for its future between continued production and conservation. These families would like to increase production through expansion which could damage the landscape. The Department of Culture wants the mine transformed into a tourist site, which would require a drop or stop in production, the culmination of a decades-long government-led campaign that encroaches on native ancestral ways of understanding. As a result, landscapes that have been alive, occupied and productive since pre-Columbian times are forced to become frozen monuments through conservation policies that favor tourism and driven by a rigid ethos of preservation. These policies threaten the cohesion of these communities that can no longer live and work in a symbiotic way with their own land.
Both sides need the other—the locals rely on tourist income and the site is more compelling to tourists if it is a working landscape. However, the site as currently arranged and constructed cannot support both visions.
The scope of the studio will be to develop a project that can reconcile production and tourism and bring these two opposing visions together. We will re-imagine and increase the efficiency of the mine’s production infrastructure, preserve the qualities of the landscape, integrate the ancestral technology to contemporary standards, and show it to the world in a respectful and careful way.
HERITAGE
Over time, our presence on Earth has left traces that add to the countless geological marks in the mantle, configuring cultural landscapes in constant evolution. Each intervention adds a new layer, defines and redefines an ever-changing reality. The accumulation of these layers supports the emergence of memory, and when what is retained proves lasting and memorable, it becomes our heritage.
Heritage, understood as preserving a particular place in relation to a specific moment, is an idea invented by modernity that implies isolating it from the fluid dynamics of cultural production over time. It resists adding new layers of meaning to these designated places, distancing them from the communities that generate these cultural dynamics.
It is imperative that we find innovative ways to integrate heritage sites into the evolving contemporary social and economic dynamics. By doing so, we can ensure that these sites become part of a living legacy and serve as opportunities for the future of the communities that inhabit them, depend on them, and keep them alive. By looking at them with a different gaze, these places might become potential sites of experimentation, allowing us to learn from the past and respond to the pressing problems of the present.
PROGRAM
The studio will search for concrete and meaningful ways architecture can transform the Maras Salt Mine site and unravel its crossed purposes, allowing productivity, tourism, and cultural heritage to coexist. This will require three components: a rearrangement of the production buildings; a reconfiguration of the tourist circuit and the retail spaces linked to salt production; and an introduction of pedagogic programs and or additional facilities that might benefit the community. Each student, after consultation with experts and travel through the Cusco Region, will identify latent or potential programs or activities that can be introduced on the site. They will then develop a project that balances the three programs at different scales of intervention, from the landscape to the construction detail.
STUDIO
This design-based studio will search for new relations between landscape, infrastructure, production and culture, pushing the limits—and sometimes blurring them—between architecture and landscape design, redefining connections between buildings, open-air spaces, ecologies and pre-existing conditions.
At the start of the studio, students will work in pairs developing research around a series of relevant topics. This will build a collective knowledge base for understanding the site and the challenges it presents.
With help from lectures by experts we will also build an understanding of three distinct discourses that will inform our design efforts: Critical Conservation, Production Systems, and Cultural Practices. These will be the basis of a series of initial imaging and site study exercises.
We will travel to Peru, visit the site at Maras, meet with members of the community that runs it and with local scholars, and subsequently travel around the region of Cusco to understand the dynamics between landscape, infrastructure, culture and climate. We will visit outstanding examples of Inca culture in this region. In Lima, we will visit a museum with key holdings related to the Sacred Valley as well as contemporary projects such as Grafton Architect’s UTEC building and the Barclay & Crousse project, the Place of Remembrance.
On returning to school, students will develop individual responses that catalyze the three initial discourses through the programs of an interpretation center for tourists, spaces for production, and their own proposed program. These proposals will be multi-scalar, ranging from landscape design or architectural details. The development of the projects will unfold in five phases:
- FINDING: will focus on design research with a highly personal approach, coupling specific inquiries with open-ended explorations that yield unexpected responses. It will be complemented by multi-disciplinary lectures about the main topics.
- GROUNDING will focus on understanding the complexity of the site through a series of exercises that pair subjective and strategic approaches. It will emphasize placemaking, carefully studying the topological characteristics based on preexisting historical conditions and new usages.
- POSITIONING will locate the programs, activities, and buildings in the site. It will also demand that students take a position in relation to intervening in a living heritage site and what role of contemporary architecture can play in benefitting the community.
- FOUNDING will concentrate on the overall and refined design, integrating landscape, architecture, and detail scales in a comprehensive intervention.
- FOCUSING will bring special attention to a component of the project and develop it to the scale of the detail.
While proposing contemporary solutions to our site’s challenges, the aspiration is that student projects will also draw from ancient knowledge to restore a new sacredness to this neglected place.