La Moneda Cultural Center

This guide to La Moneda Cultural Center in Santiago starts on the plaza above it, where a long reflecting pool set into the paving is the only clue to exhibition halls, a film archive and an arts center built entirely underground. It follows architects Cristián Undurraga and Ana Luisa Devés, who won the competition to design a building that had to stay invisible beside La Moneda's neoclassical facade, and traces the center's opening in January 2006, timed to Chile's approaching bicentennial. You'll descend the same ramps its first visitors did, daylight filtering green through the pool overhead.