MUPTU. Turi Pukara Museum Part 2 Project 2012 Stephan PüSchel University of Chile | Chile Turi is situated in the province of El Loa, in the Atacama Desert at an altitude 3,100 meters. An extremely arid place, distant from the daily life of the cities, it is capable of transporting us to other realities and perceptions of space by way of the overwhelming characteristics presented by its orography. A sublime landscape of lunar and pre-historic features where the limits of time and space are confused with the horizon. The project seeks to give value to the ruins of Chile’s largest remaining “pukara” (native fortress), which currently lies in a forgotten state of deterioration, as well as helping to consolidate the cultural-landscape tourist route of the area and boost the human development of the ancestral villages of which it is composed.Inspired by local traditions, the design is constructed gathering the self-same codes that underlie this type of territory, lines and laws that have been assimilated ancestrally by the pre-Columbian Andean cultures that left their view of the world manifested in their constructions. The scales that both the territory and the pukara possess are transformed as fundamental axes that determine the mode of operating in a landscape of such pristine characteristics. The landscape operation which gives form to the project remains defined as the revelation of these ancestral ruins within the immensurable and silent vastness of the desert. A guide carved in the landscape that, determined on the basis of a cosmic and symbolic relationship with the place, will remain fixed in the territory for eternity. The idea is to generate a confrontation between body and space through a series of dramatic moments interrelated among each other so as to produce, by means of emotion, a connection with the ancient past. It is a trip through a space dominated by the density of matter, weight, silence and materialized light that allows having an experience of ourselves as embodied and spiritual beings. It is an experience that becomes part of our identity, body, memory and essence. Tutor(s) Albert Tidy