Archival restraint: a finely honed, sensitive interchange between past and present in one of Europe's most beautiful cities.

On the highest part of the rock on which the old city of Toledo is founded is the conventual church of San Marcos. The convent itself was founded in 1220 and went through many changes in its long life -- one of the most dramatic of which was the addition of the church of Santisima Trinidad begun in 1628 by Jorge Manuel Theotocopuli (presumably, like Toledo's most famous painter El Greco, a refugee to the city from Venice's failing Cretean colony).

By the mid 1980s, the whole San Marcos complex was in a terrible mess. The convent had been secularized as barracks in the early nineteenth century, and the place disintegrated from then on, until the virtually ruined convent buildings were demolished in 1960. Quarter of a century later, the church itself was secularized, and the municipality decided to have a competition to transform the area into a cultural centre. Ignacio Mendaro Corsini won, but it took many years to attract funding (from both local and EC sources) and to work out how to deal with a most complicated site, at which the turn of a shovel could reveal a Roman oven or an Arabic cistern. The old had always to be respected as far as possible, during the making of a cultural focus for a modern community.

Three stages of activity were identified. First, the church, which by then was almost in ruins itself, had to be consolidated as a structure and space. Second, it had to be transformed into the cultural centre. And third, the area left vacant by the demolition of the convent buildings (further down the steep hill from the church itself) was to be the site for a new municipal archive and reading room.

A good deal of local hostility was generated when it was decided to build the new part in poured concrete. But (for traditionalists) the architects pointed to the material's Roman origins, and for modernists, they provided walls with superbly smooth yet delicately boarded texture, and a warm colour derived from natural materials that resonates with local stone.

The church has been altered to form an auditorium with partly raked seating in the nave and exhibition spaces in the aisles and triforium. It has two entrances, one from the north, through the original door, and the other from the south, up stairs that link to the courtyard of the new archive building, a level below. Because of the dramatic fall of the site, the court is entered at street level. Careful as always to preserve traces of history, the architects floated parts of the court on a concrete deck over medieval and Roman foundations. The route leads towards the double doors that lead to stairs which go up to the south aisle of the church. A sharp right here brings you to the arched entrance of the archive building, a sort of rabbit hole leading to a marvellous hidden Lewis Carroll world, in which scale is suddenly and strangely distorted.

You arrive in the archive at an intermediate level, on a gallery that overlooks the quadruple-height space of the reading room. This fine volume is lit from skylights and windows high up on the north (church-facing) side, so light is muted but quite strong enough to fill the whole place with luminance. Immediately opposite is the tawny wall of the three-storey archive box, chastely pierced with small square windows. Below are the reading desks, to which you descend by an elegant freestanding spiral stair clad in a metal drum.

Four grave cylindrical concrete columns unite the space and add overtones of academic cloister. A glass wall at the west end of the reading floor looks out point blank at the ancient masonry remains of the convent which are lit from the sky. This image is a distillation of Mendaro's approach to the whole atmosphere, in which present and past are in continuous dialogue to create the future.

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Ignacio Mendaro Corsini, Madrid

Project team

Jose Ignacio Montes Herraiz, Vicente Gonzalez Laguillo, Mariano Martin, Maria Hurtado de Mendoza, Cesar Jimenez Benavides, Paco Farina, Salvador Campuzano, Ignacio Isasi, Carmen Arroyo, Rodrigo Penjeam, Jesus Higueras Diez, Juan Valverde, David Rodriguez

Structural engineer

Julio Garcia Maroto

Photographs

Liuis Casals