Atacama Paleontological Museum and Research Center Part 1 Project 2013 Ramiro Contreras University of Chile | Chile The Atacama desert is a plateau in South America, it is the driest hot desert in the world. The unique landscape includes important natural heritages, such as the “rocks zoo”, the orbicular granite, and extremely ancient whale fossils.The project is located in this desert, ten kilometres north of the city of Caldera, between the Panamerican roadway and the Pacific Ocean The concept comes from the observation of the geometry of the natural forms in the area, the rocks, the horizontality of the desert and the generation of a vertically milestone, and mainly from the need to take charge of the paleontological fossils.A paleontological museum and research center representative of the city of Caldera, must configure an architecture capable of rescuing the most identifiable aspect of the Atacama desert: its extraordinary geography and natural heritage, marked by the dramatic, bright, stony, solid, and silent relationship between the desert and the sea, between earth and sky.We seek an architecture according to this stony, gravitational, excavated geometry, a transfer from the desert to the sea, which forms a closed primarily interior that opens gradually to the outside, which is related to the geometry of the nature. Ramiro Contreras Tutor(s) Leopoldo Prat