Earthen Architecture and Landscape: The U-shaped Temples of Pre-Hispanic Lima

Contemporary Lima is located between the Andes and the Pacific, in a desert area comprising three valleys. Because of extensive urban sprawl, the existing city, home to over ten million people, has effaced the traces of the indigenous territory and its ancient architecture, intensely connected to the landscape. Vestiges include a series of temples of colossal dimensions, built more than 4,500 years ago, that are testimony of an innovative landscape architecture, even by contemporary terms. From the territorial standpoint, this architecture is evidence of the civilizing process that involved the transformation of desert space into agricultural land. Such initial public architecture comprises ritual spaces and specialized support activities that reflect complex forms of social organization and signify the birth of new forms of power. It is a primigenial architecture linked to the territory that appears in the landscape made up by indissolubly, mutually supportive construction units. The large platforms containing ceremonial spaces rise as a huge U-shaped landscape structure spanning spaces of up to 40 hectares, open to the landscape. Our research aims to recover the territorial memory of this landscape architecture, and with it, the diachronic link between architecture and territory, broken by intense colonization and urbanization. With the support of archaeological work, architectural analysis, historical graphic documentation and modern photogrammetric techniques, we draw maps and adopt reconstructive approaches, covering every step, from the drawing of the territory to architectural modeling. These maps lay the foundation for an essential planning and design tool, allowing us to intervene in the city from a different perspective, to recover the memory and take a sensitive look at the past, to understand contemporary space without breaking continuity with the underlying indigenous territory, and to draw lessons from this unique cultural landscape, permeated by the Andean worldview that is still latent in today’s overflowing metropolis.