MuNa/projects/ecuador-museum/ref/project-chassis.md

Project Chassis — Shared Invariants for All Narratives

This document distills the fixed design facts that all four stakeholder narratives (narratives/01-visitor.md through narratives/04-community.md) must be consistent with. It is not itself a narrative — it is the settled reference the narratives draw on so that a detail mentioned by one stakeholder (a material, a color, a named place, where a collection lives) is never contradicted by another.

Primary source: ref/Casa de la Memoria Andina - National Museum Narrative-Kimi.txt (Nikos Salingaros), which already fixes most of these invariants and supplies the Visitor narrative's own prose almost wholesale. Secondary sources: ref/brief-condensed.md (official brief facts) and ref/critique-failures.md (named failures to steer clear of).

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1. Fixed facts (already set by Salingaros's document — do not re-derive)

Site area: see §4 below for the settled figure to cite.

Building envelope: minimum 25,000 m² arranged on four principal levels of approx. 6,250 m² each; footprint under 50% of the site.

Building complex (pattern 95 Building Complex / 99 Main Building):

• Archaeological wing
• Historical wing
• Artistic wing
• Temporary-exhibition and education wing
• A taller central building housing the Great Hall (pattern 99 Main Building) — the institutional "head" toward which all roofs and paths converge.

Materials strata (tectonic sequence, base to crown):

1. Dark Ecuadorian andesite at the plinth, steps, portal, and principal structural frames.
2. Thick limewashed tapial and adobe at the lower/middle levels.
3. Lighter bahareque and timber in the upper galleries, gables, balconies, and sheltered internal façades.
4. Red-brown clay tile roofs with deep aleros (eaves) throughout.

Color system — CR1 "Quito White & Andesite": matte lime-white wall fields; andesite at plinth/steps/portal/frames; dark walnut carpentry; natural red-brown roof tile; near-black wrought iron (rejas); a restrained oxblood zócalo on selected lower walls only. Color is concentrated on doors, windows, rails, and chosen interior elements — never spread indiscriminately.

Ornament system — OP2 "Chakana and Diamond Course", concentrated at base, threshold, and crown only (never as surface decoration across whole walls): diamond-coursed masonry banding in the andesite plinth; stepped chakana-derived profiles on stair edges, portal mouldings, metal grilles, door pulls, and a small number of cornice transitions — made through masonry bonding, timber joinery, perforation, and shadow, never applied graphics. Ornament density increases toward the entrance portal and subsides once past it, so patios and galleries stay calm.

OP4 "Quiteño Retablo Episode" — exactly one contained figurative wall, inside the Great Hall: a tiered field of niches and frames holding abstracted sun and moon discs, maize, Andean flowers, birds, and animal forms, integrated with the orientation desk, stair landing, and the first objects of the collection. This is the single deliberate concentration of figurative ornament in the entire building — every other major wall stays calm. No narrative may introduce a second figurative episode elsewhere; that would violate OP4's own "one contained episode" discipline.

Entrance sequence: street → Civic Atrio (raised forecourt, ceremonial steps, activity pockets, screened parking) → entrance portal (five-bay stone composition, ornament density peaks here) → zaguán (cool, dim, acoustically hushed transition passage) → Patio of Origins (first sunlit realm). This sequence is staged and bodily and reverses exactly on departure.

Equatorial sun-capture (resolves pattern-subset gap): the pattern subset's own "South Facing Outdoors" (105) and "Indoor Sunlight" (128) patterns assume a temperate-latitude sun that rakes from the south — this does not describe Quito, which sits almost exactly on the equator, where the sun passes near zenith at midday year-round rather than favoring one compass-facing façade. Salingaros's document resolves this correctly: the Patio of Origins is "proportioned so that the high equatorial sun reaches the paving and planting while the surrounding corredores remain in shade." All narratives should describe sun-capture through courtyard proportion and high-sun geometry, not through literal south-facing orientation. This is also the chassis's direct rebuttal of failure #9 in ref/critique-failures.md (the winning proposal's unrealized "sun protagonist" rhetoric) — here the sun-claim is geometrically real and checkable against the plan.

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2. Named-realm mapping (gap closed)

Salingaros's document names six circulation realms — Civic Atrio → Patio of Origins → Great Hall → Corredor of Time → Patio of Memory → Garden of the Arts — but its narrative body only explicitly ties the first three to their names; the historical- and artistic-wing passages describe content without naming the realm. This chassis pins down the remaining mapping so all narratives can use realm names consistently:

Named realm	Wing / content it denotes	Textual basis
Civic Atrio	The raised public forecourt at street level	Explicit in source text
Patio of Origins	First courtyard; opens off entrance hall, archaeological galleries, café, education rooms	Explicit in source text
Great Hall	The central taller building; institutional heart, main staircase	Explicit in source text
Corredor of Time	The historical wing's chronological gallery route — "the earthen middle of the building," colonial through republican and modern national life, with periodic common-room expansions	Matches "route is chronological... expands into a common room... where groups can rest and rejoin"
Patio of Memory	The courtyard serving the historical wing / archive-and-library zone — a place of rest and reflection adjacent to the documentary collections	Thematically paired with "memory" = archive/documentary material; positioned as the historical wing's own courtyard, distinct from the Patio of Origins (archaeology) and any artistic-wing garden
Garden of the Arts	The garden/courtyard the artistic wing's recessed balconies and balcón corrido overlook, near the roofed mirador	Matches "galleries open toward recessed balconies and a balcón corrido overlooking the principal patio... a sunny garden" in the Edges/courts/gardens passage

This mapping is a considered completion, not a re-invention: it follows the thematic logic already present in the source prose (time/chronology → historical wing's route; memory/documents → historical wing's rest-court; arts → artistic wing's garden) rather than assigning names arbitrarily.

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3. Collection-reserve placement (gap closed)

The official brief organizes the National Collection into five reserves (ref/brief-condensed.md); Salingaros's document only names three collection wings. This chassis settles where all five reserves live:

Reserve (brief)	Building location
Archaeology Reserve (62,103 pieces)	Archaeological wing — the lowest, heaviest realm (dark stone, cool, quiet rooms), opening onto the Patio of Origins
Colonial and Republican Reserve (5,353 pieces)	Historical wing / Corredor of Time — "colonial Quito through republican... national life" is exactly this reserve's period range
Modern and Contemporary Art Reserve (2,538 works)	Artistic wing / Garden of the Arts — "the light timber crown," Ecuador's 20th–21st-century art
Human Sciences Library (~210,000 items, incl. Jijón y Caamaño and Isaac Barrera collections)	A dedicated reading room / study center adjacent to the historical wing, opening onto the Patio of Memory — publicly accessible (not storage-only), giving researchers and the curious a real room to sit in, not an abstract adjunct to the galleries
Historical Archive (918,673 documents)	Conservation-and-study spaces adjacent to the historical wing / Patio of Memory, alongside the Human Sciences Library — this is where the manuscripts, photographs, musical scores, recordings, cartography, and posters are held and consulted

This placement directly answers the brief's own framing that the museum "currently exhibits less than 1% of its collection" (ref/brief-condensed.md §1): the Human Sciences Library and Historical Archive, previously invisible adjuncts, now have a named, inhabited place — the Patio of Memory precinct — rather than disappearing into an unlabeled "historical wing." The Staff narrative (librarians, archivists, conservators) and the Community narrative (researchers, heritage-community members consulting patrimonial material) should both describe this precinct concretely.

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4. Site-area figure (discrepancy resolved)

ref/brief-condensed.md flagged a rounding difference: the official brief states 13,004.65 m²; Salingaros's document rounds this to "13,000 m²" in its project-parameters table and again in spoken discussion in ref/youtube-transcript.txt ("the entire site is 13,000"). Both describe the same plot — this is rounding, not a conflicting claim.

Decision: new narrative prose (all four stakeholder files) should cite the official 13,004.65 m² figure when precision matters (e.g. stating site data plainly), but conversational or scene-setting references may use "about 13,000 m²" the way Salingaros's own prose does. Do not alter Salingaros's existing narrative text to "correct" this — per ecuador-7vi.1's adaptation principle, maximum reuse of his prose, no unnecessary rewriting of a rounding difference that isn't actually wrong.

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5. Failures actively avoided (cross-reference to ref/critique-failures.md)

Failure (critique transcript)	How this chassis avoids it
#1 Illegible/invisible entrance	Explicit five-bay portal, staged entrance sequence, Entrance Room at the Great Hall's perimeter
#2 Blank "avoidant" facades	OP2 ornament concentrated at base/threshold/crown, CR1 warm color system, small-paned glazing
#3 Monolithic mass	Building complex of five named wings/hall, not a single undifferentiated volume
#4 Disconnected from urban context	Civic Atrio graduates city scale to institutional scale; screened parking keeps street frontage active
#5 Parking dominance	Parking screened behind planted walls/secondary wings, subordinate to the entrance portal's visibility
#6 No courtyards/landscaping	Patio of Origins, Patio of Memory, Garden of the Arts — three named, planted, water-active courts
#7 Inhuman scale	Great Hall's perimeter "drops to a human register"; six-foot-plus balconies; narrow wings (max width per pattern 107)
#8 All-concrete, no color	CR1/OP2 systems plus Ecuadorian Form Language Grammar vocabulary (tapial, adobe, bahareque, timber)
#9 Hollow "sun" rhetoric	Sun-capture is geometrically real: courtyard proportion tuned to equatorial high-sun, not a rhetorical claim
#10 Illegible circulation	Six named, sequential circulation realms; building thoroughfares 4.5–6 m wide; staircase as stage
#11 Dead, unsupervised edges	Building Edge/Activity Pockets: arcades, activity pockets, and inhabited edge-thickness line every court and street frontage

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Notes for narrative authors

• Quote or closely paraphrase Salingaros's existing prose where it already covers a stakeholder's experience (this is explicit for the Visitor narrative per ecuador-7vi.1) — do not invent new materials, colors, or spatial names not present in this chassis or the pattern subset.
• Every design claim in every narrative must trace to: a pattern in ref/A Pattern Language Ecuador National Museum.md, a fact in ref/brief-condensed.md, an element of ref/Ecuadorian_Form_Language_Grammar.md, or this chassis document. Anything else is a hallucination to be caught at the cross-check stage (ecuador-7vi.5).