Federico Coscio

The Hermetic Walls
This is a series of photographs, taken during research in the Cusco region of Peru, that aims to showcase a typology of pre-Columbian constructions with several unique characteristics not found anywhere else in the world. These walls were built over a period of 800 years until the arrival of the Spanish (although there are controversies regarding these dates), generally in locations far from the quarries where the stones were extracted.
Despite the sophisticated technology they exhibit, no precision tools have been found that could have been used for their construction, nor any evidence of trial and error, or workshops for the transmission of knowledge. The hermetic nature of their joints, which are curved and helical, challenges logic on both scientific and technological levels, while in terms of design, they show a relationship between form and function that seems to stem from the same principle and source of information.
This aesthetic value led me to study the morphology of Cusco's walls for 15 years, conducting a photographic survey of more than 30 pre-Columbian structures, and creating a series of paintings based on the proportional principles of the geometry of their designs. My study of the proportional principles governing these structures culminated in a mathematical hypothesis where I identified generalizable patterns that could be demonstrated through constants for quadratic functions. This demonstration was generalized to all types of structures composed of different pieces, which I managed to classify in a geometric treatise proposing models for studying complex structures, called the "Anti-Crystal Theory." This treatise was published in 2014 and is still being developed today. Currently, these findings are applied to architectural design and molecular biology research, resulting in two companies with industrial patents.
These walls are evidence of a way of relating human beings to the technology they produce, a relationship that perhaps has never been seen again on Earth. First, because of the magnificence of the work, not in the enormity of the blocks but in the fine detail of their finishes, and finally in the inseparable relationship between the technological and the artistic. From a contemporary perspective, these walls seem like sculptures fitted together to form a building.