Planetario de la USACH

This guide to the Planetario de la USACH in Santiago opens with a Carl Zeiss star projector shipped as a government gift from Germany near the end of the 1960s, then crated in a physics department storeroom for fifteen years while the country lived through the 1973 coup and its aftermath. You'll hear about architect Oscar Mac-Clure's 1982 design, a truncated cone modeled on the stepped pyramids of Chichen Itza, with water designed to cascade down its face and pool in basins echoing Maya cenotes. It traces the building's 1985 opening and the copper cladding added twelve years later.