Recoleta Cultural Center, Cultural center in Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina

The Recoleta Cultural Center occupies the former General Viamonte Asylum, a 1732 building in Recoleta, Buenos Aires. Its red facade with white pilasters and a triangular pediment holding a circular medallion faces the entrance, where a glass-and-metal canopy covers black-framed doors. Inside are 16 exhibition rooms, four courtyards, a terrace, the chapel-turned-concert hall La Capilla, a cinema and the LIPM music laboratory, across 25,000 square metres.

The building was donated to the Franciscans in 1716; Jesuit architects Juan Krauss and Juan Wolf drew the plans, and the facade and interiors are attributed to Andres Blanqui. It was finished in 1732. Manuel Belgrano founded a drawing school there, and from the 1870s it served as a shelter for the destitute. Juan Antonio Buschiazzo gave it an Italian style and created the chapel now used as an auditorium; Clorindo Testa, Jacques Bedel and Luis Benedit renovated it around 1980 as a cultural centre.

The building was donated to the Franciscans in 1716, and the Recoleta name comes from that community. Since 1980 the centre has been known as the seat of emerging art: its rooms hosted design, fashion and the underground scenes born in the last years of the military dictatorship. Today the programme includes hip hop battles, the Clave 13/17 teenage committee and the annual Clave festival.

The centre opens Tuesday to Sunday; entry is free for Argentines and residents, while foreign tourists pay a fixed admission fee, and workshops are charged separately. It occupies 25,000 square metres, 18,000 of them covered, with four courtyards, a terrace and the former chapel now used as a concert hall. The main door on Junín Street leads under the glass canopy into the entrance hall.

The centre's music laboratory is the LIPM, one of the facilities listed among its 16 exhibition rooms, chapel-turned-concert hall, cinema and four patios. In 1989 the first Bienal de Arte Joven linked it to the Palais de Glace by a bridge built of scaffolding, with Batato Barea and Alejandro Urdapilleta performing on an outdoor stage.