“Thinking Beyond Stones: Ephemerality and the Inca Built Environment” with Stella Nair
Sekler Plenary Talk at Society of Architectural Historians 2025 Virtual Conference
Saturday, September 20 at 12:00–1:00 pm, online
While the Inca are well known for their impressive lithic architecture, this only made up a small portion of their built environment. In this presentation Stella Nair argues that to understand Inca architecture we must consider the crucial role of the ephemeral. This includes the thatch and reeds that became the roofs of monumental Inca structures, as well as the adobe, rammed earth, wattle and daub, textiles, leather, and quincha(woven walls), that made up much of the Inca built environment. Each of these materials necessitated distinctly different knowledge systems and ways of building while carrying distinct meanings. In addition, we must also consider the temporary, such as the massive cities they made and unmade across the Andes and came to define much of the Inca empire and Inca spatial practices. A consideration of the ephemeral and the temporary forces us to reconsider what constituted Inca architecture but also forces us to confront the biases and assumptions we make about materials, space, time, labor, knowledge, and gender in architecture.
Trained as an architect and architectural historian, Stella Nair is Associate Professor of Art History at the UCLA. Her scholarship focuses on the built environment of Indigenous communities in the Americas and is shaped by her interests in construction technology, spatial practices, aural and ephemeral architecture, and gender studies. Nair has published At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero, which examines the sophisticated ways in which the Inca manipulated space and architecture to impose their authority, and (co-authored with Jean-Pierre Protzen), The Stones of Tiahuanaco: A Study of Architecture and Construction, explores one of the world’s most artful and sophisticated carving traditions. Nair recently completed a third volume (co-edited with Paul Niell), The Forgotten Canopy: Ephemeral Architecture, Ecology, and Imperialism in the Americas (under review) and is currently completing a fourth manuscript, Women and the Making of Inca Architecture.
2025-08-29