San Pablo Academic and Cultural Centre

The first Dominican convent in Oaxaca had been swallowed by four centuries of subdivision — shops, tenements, a cinema — when the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú bought it in 2005 and commissioned a rescue in 2008 from the Taller de Arquitectura of Mauricio Rocha, where Gabriela Carrillo was directing projects and with whom the office has been jointly named since 2012. The strategy was subtraction before addition: strip the accretions, recover about ninety per cent of the upper and lower corridors, and leave the sixteenth-century stone visible and unrestored where it survives. What is new declares itself as new — white rendered volumes with deep recessed openings, a curtain of steel and glass hung inside the cloister arcade so the courtyard can be used year-round, and open brick paving through which grass grows. It opened on 26 November 2011.