Q’eswachaka: A Bridge Made Again

Grass is an unusual place to begin a drawing of a bridge. A pencil usually starts at one bank, crosses the gap and finds the other side. At Q’eswachaka in Peru, start instead with the short pieces of fibre that can be held in one hand. The span over the Apurímac is the last part of the drawing to appear. By then the sheet should already be crowded with hands.

In Short

Four Quechua communities renew the crossing each year. The bridge makes a useful distinction between how long an individual piece of fabric lasts and how long people can keep making a place together.

Picture Notes

These notes describe the AI illustration shown with this article, not photographs of the real place.

1. Lead illustration: Close detail — AI illustration — a close view of one detail, showing the landscape setting with a warm palette.

A drawing that starts in the hands

The Smithsonian’s account follows grass through several changes of scale. It is twisted into cord. Cords are worked together into larger ropes, and ropes are braided into the cables carried to the bridge. Seen on paper, that progression might look like three enlarged details on a drawing sheet. In the construction footage, the difference between them is also a difference in how many people have to move together to handle each piece.

Imagine setting out those details in a row, with a hand drawn to the same scale beside each one. At the beginning the hand would fill much of the frame. By the time the cable reached the gorge, a drawing of a single pair of hands would leave out much of what is happening. The collaboration becomes legible in the dimensions of the material itself.

Where a line meets the bank

Four of the large cables carry the floor. Two serve as handrails. At the ends, the ropes meet stone. That junction is the detail to linger over in a section drawing. One material keeps its place on the bank while another can be released and replaced. Drawing the two as a single neat line would conceal the most interesting part of the connection.

Across the span, smaller ties connect the upper ropes to the lower ones. An elevation makes it possible to follow those lines from end to end. A close detail offers a different reading. There the fibre turns back on itself, individual strands cross and the broad curve of the bridge disappears from view. Both drawings describe the same structure, yet each reveals work that the other omits.

Building on a calendar

The renewal involves Huinchiri, Chaupibanda, Choccayhua and Ccollana Quehue. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival records the preparations and the offerings that accompany the work. There is a particular risk in illustrating only the suspended span. Crop away the work on the banks and the four communities can vanish from the account, even though their participation is what carries the practice from one renewal to the next.

A conventional architectural archive keeps a completed drawing and assigns it a date. What would an archive of this crossing need to keep? A sequence would say more than a single elevation. There would be a place in it for preparation, another for the moment the ropes are drawn across the water, and another for the finished deck. A reader could return to the first sheet after looking at the last one and understand why the bridge begins away from the river.

ARCHITECTT Note

Q’eswachaka asks a precise question of a designer. If a component is meant to be replaced, where does the knowledge for making its successor live? A drawing can specify a connection. The people who know how to make that connection, and who can teach it to someone else, give the drawing a future.

Sources and method

The Smithsonian’s The Bridge at Q’eswachaka documents the cables and construction sequence. Its Folklife Festival account identifies the participating communities. UNESCO describes the renewal and its ceremonies. The drawing exercises above are editorial interpretations.

FAQ

Where is Q’eswachaka?

The bridge crosses a gorge of the Apurímac River in the southern Peruvian Andes.

What holds the crossing together?

Grass is twisted into cord, then worked into ropes and braided cables. Four main cables support the floor and two form the handrails.

What is renewed each year?

Local communities remake the suspended crossing and pass on the skills involved in preparing, joining and weaving its ropes.