Lola Mora Cultural Center Opens in Jujuy, Giving Argentine Sculpture a New Civic Home

Designed by César Pelli, the new cultural center in San Salvador de Jujuy places six Lola Mora sculptures within a transparent, net-zero building shaped by the Yunga landscape.

Pelli Clarke & Partners Completes Lola Mora Cultural Center in San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina — Image: Jason O'Rear for Pelli Clarke & Partners. Source: ArchDaily.

The Lola Mora Cultural Center has opened in San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina, bringing six sculptures by the pioneering Argentine artist into a permanent exhibition setting. Designed by César Pelli and Pelli Clarke & Partners, the 3,000-square-metre cultural building occupies a wooded site at the foot of the Andes and combines exhibition spaces, interpretation facilities, a library, restaurant, shop and artist atelier. The center opened in July 2026 after construction was completed that year, according to the Jujuy provincial government and the architects’ official project documentation.

The institution is dedicated to Lola Mora, who lived from 1866 to 1936 and became one of Argentina’s most important sculptors at a time when sculpture was still treated as an unusually restricted profession for women. The six works now displayed in Jujuy include five allegorical figures—The Progress, Liberty, Justice, Peace and Labor—and a pair of lions. Their new setting gives the collection a coherent architectural frame while reconnecting it with a broader public audience.

A building that opens toward the landscape

Pelli Clarke & Partners describes the center as emerging from the Yunga forest, where dense vegetation gives way to views across San Salvador de Jujuy and toward the surrounding mountains. The building’s principal gesture is one of gradual release: a narrow entrance expands into a lobby and exhibition hall, while a broad glazed façade brings the forest directly into the visual field of the museum.

The architecture is deliberately quiet around the sculptures. A large cantilevered roof establishes long, column-free spaces, creating a protective horizontal plane above the galleries. Instead of treating the building as a sealed container, the design uses transparency, skylights and framed views to make the natural setting part of the visitor’s experience. The sculptures can be encountered from different distances and angles, with the gallery organized less as a linear corridor than as a sequence of visual relationships.

This approach matters because Lola Mora’s work is inherently public. Her sculptures were conceived for civic and monumental contexts, where allegory had to be legible at a distance and where bodies, gestures and symbolic attributes carried political meaning. The new center does not simply isolate the works for conservation. It gives them room to be read spatially, allowing visitors to move around them and observe how scale, light and material alter their presence.

From displaced monuments to a permanent collection

The center also addresses the unsettled history of the sculptures. The allegorical figures and lions were originally associated with Argentina’s National Congress before being removed and eventually placed in Jujuy, where they became provincial heritage. Their path reflects the vulnerability of public art: works can be celebrated, criticized, relocated or politically reinterpreted as institutions and social values change.

That history lends the building a significance beyond authorship. The center is a cultural act of reassembly. It gathers works that had been dispersed within a single institution, restoring the possibility of seeing them as a group and of understanding their relationship to Mora’s career. The new museum therefore functions simultaneously as an archive, an exhibition venue and a statement about whose contributions deserve durable civic visibility.

Its wider program reinforces that ambition. Alongside the permanent display, the project includes a temporary exhibition room, interpretation center, library, restaurant, gift shop and atelier for visiting artists. These additions turn the building into an active cultural destination rather than a monument to a completed historical narrative. The institution can host research, education, temporary exhibitions and contemporary artistic production around Mora’s legacy.

Net-zero ambition in a demanding climate

The project’s environmental strategy is unusually integrated with its formal language. The architects describe the center as a net-zero energy facility using photovoltaic panels, solar collectors and wind turbines. Their project information states that the building produces 120 percent of its energy consumption on site, while a high-performance envelope and mechanical systems reduce energy demand by 23 percent. The project also has a LEED Gold objective, according to the firm’s published specifications.

Water management extends the sustainability brief beyond energy. Rainwater is collected for irrigation, while small dams help capture runoff and reduce erosion on the site. This is particularly relevant in a building surrounded by the Yunga’s dense vegetation and mountainous terrain, where landscape is not a decorative layer but an active environmental condition.

Material choices further connect the interior to its regional setting. Reporting by Infobae describes palo blanco wood flooring, hand-chiseled exterior stone and acoustic surfaces made from recycled PET and dark Pacará wood. These details give the center a tactile register that balances the expansive glass envelope. The result is not an abstract sustainability showcase, but a building whose environmental systems, materials and spatial character are intended to operate as one composition.

The civic afterlife of a final design

The project carries the emotional weight of César Pelli’s late career and his connection to Argentina, although claims about it being his final project should be treated cautiously. What can be established is that the building bears his design authorship and that the completed institution now gives a major cultural presence to a region often represented through landscape rather than architecture.

Its importance will ultimately depend on use. A transparent gallery and efficient energy systems can provide the conditions for cultural renewal, but they cannot produce it alone. The center must make Mora’s work intelligible to local visitors, attract sustained educational activity and support a living program of exhibitions and research. If it succeeds, the building will do more than preserve six sculptures. It will demonstrate how architecture can transform contested or displaced heritage into a shared public resource.