Jaramillo Van Sluys Arquitectura and Urbanismo Turn a Demolished Registry Lot in Quito into an Orchard Plaza

For half a century, the back of the Convento de San Agustín was invisible. From 1964 to 2015, the Registro Civil building sat on calle Mejía, between calles Guayaquil and Flores, in Quito's Centro Histórico, and it blocked the rear of one of the city's monumental heritage complexes. When the building came down, it left a strip of land and an almost 8 m convent retaining wall that had not faced the street in decades. Plaza Huerto San Agustín, completed in 2016 by Jaramillo Van Sluys Arquitectura, the practice of Esteban Jaramillo and Christine Van Sluys, with Urbanismo also credited, is the 2,800 m² answer to what should happen on that strip.

The interesting part is not the demolition, and it is not the greenery, although both matter. The architects treated the ground itself as an archive. The paving reads the city's old maps back onto the street, bronze lines trace a building that no longer exists, and a set of plaques shows four centuries of the block changing. Plenty of plazas claim to honor memory. This one encodes it in materials you walk on every day. Its selection among the 26 works for the Rogelio Salmona Latin American Architecture Prize 2024 suggests the idea has held up eight years on.

Unmasking the Convent Wall

The most consequential decision was to leave the convent's retaining wall exposed and make it the backdrop of the whole space. Clad in stone, the wall closes the plaza on one side with real heft. At almost 8 m, it is too tall to sit comfortably beside a pedestrian, so the designers put a metal pergola at its foot. The pergola steps the scale down between the wall and the main walking platform and gives the ground floor somewhere to host programmed activity.

In the photographs, the white convent and the rust-toned vertical elements read as two distinct registers: the heritage fabric is still and pale, and the new insertions are warm and slatted. We think the contrast works because the new pieces stay thin. They frame the wall instead of competing with it, and the bell tower can still be seen above the plaza from the street.

An Orchard Drawn in Stone

The striped paving is the project's core argument. On 18th-century plans of Quito, orchards were drawn with 45° hatching, and an Augustinian orchard once joined the convent's blocks north and south of calle Mejía. The architects took that graphic convention and built it at full scale. Black volcanic stone and andesite in two shades of grey run at 45°, cut by darker perpendicular bands. The same pattern already appears on the church's exterior atrium on calle Chile, so the plaza becomes part of a recognizable Augustinian ground instead of a one-off.

Using local Andean stone keeps the move honest. The orchard is not reconstructed literally with rows of fruit trees; it returns as notation. Young trees, green zones and fountains set into the paving then give it actual shade and water, which are what an orchard offers people on a hot afternoon.

A Street Given Back to Pedestrians

The plaza does not stop at the edge of the old lot. The stretch of calle Mejía was pedestrianized, so the public space now runs from building face to building face, and the north sidewalk was widened. A continuous sidewalk follows the street's existing slope and ties together the levels that were already on site, while the terraced platforms in the images handle the grade with steps that double as seating.

The designers' stated goal was public space at a domestic scale for the people who use the historic center, and the timber benches among young trees show what that means in practice: places to sit for twenty minutes, not a ceremonial forecourt. In a district where monuments often dictate the scale of open space, that restraint is a deliberate choice.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan and elevation show how long and thin the intervention is, a linear room between two streets with the convent and bell tower always behind it. The detail sheets expose the didactic layer: the four plates of the mural, redrawn from urban plans spanning the last four centuries, the circular commemorative marker, and the elevation of Howard Taikeff's humanized San Agustín, a bronze figure that walks among users instead of standing on a plinth.

The drawings also record the playful references, such as children's balance games tied to the 19th-century tale of the lizard that opened calle Mejía, and the bronze inserts that mark the footprint of the demolished Registro Civil. Together they back up the designers' claim that public space can teach, and they do it without signage overload.

Why This Project Matters

Historic centers across Latin America are full of mid-century buildings that hide older fabric, and cities keep facing the question of what to do once one is removed. Plaza Huerto San Agustín shows an approach that rejects both nostalgic reconstruction and generic hardscape. It keeps the traces of every era, including the building that was just demolished, and arranges them so a passerby can read the history at a glance.

What we value most is the economy of the means. Paving geometry, bronze lines, a few plaques, a sculpture and some shade trees do the interpretive work that a visitor center might do elsewhere. For anyone designing in a heritage setting, the lesson is that the ground plane is the cheapest, most durable and most democratic place to store a city's memory.

Plaza Huerto San Agustín by Jaramillo Van Sluys Arquitectura (Esteban Jaramillo and Christine Van Sluys) and Urbanismo, Quito, Ecuador. Area: 2,800 m². Completed: 2016. Photography: Sebastián Crespo.

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