Heritage & UNESCO

Restoring a building and designing a new city are, at bottom, the same question: how do you design a place so people inhabit it better — just applied to different timeframes.

Santiago Caprio works as a cultural heritage expert for UNESCO, a role where institutional authority is put to work in service of conserving the built heritage.

Restoration of the Iglesia El Rosario — San Salvador

One of the projects that best sums up this work is the restoration of the Iglesia El Rosario in San Salvador, covered by El Salvador’s Ministry of Public Works. The heritage conservation approach applied here doesn’t treat the historic building as a piece frozen in time, but as a place that is still inhabited — and that therefore needs to be designed, with the same design thinking as a new project, so it keeps fulfilling its role in the life of the city.

This work connects to the rest of the practice: the same eye that restores a colonial church is the one that designs an ephemeral pavilion or plans a city. The underlying question doesn’t change.

Academic foundations

The restoration approach applied to projects like the Iglesia El Rosario draws on years of academic research into how small historic centers hold identity and economic value. Piccoli Borghi / Processi di rinascita attraverso il recupero delle identità locali (laScientifica Editore, 2013) documents rebirth processes in Italian small towns through the recovery of local identity. Indicatori di Attrattività Turistica (2017), developed for the case of Finalborgo, built a framework for measuring how heritage value converts into tourism and economic development — the same logic later applied, at a different scale, to the Centro Histórico de San Salvador.

Arquitectura Emblemática — a column on LU24 Radio

Since July 2026, Santiago writes and hosts Arquitectura Emblemática, a biweekly column on LU24 Radio Tres Arroyos exploring the buildings that define a place — from its launch episode to an in-depth piece on the SOMISA building in Buenos Aires. It’s a direct extension of this pillar: the same question this page asks about restoration — what a building means to the people around it — asked out loud, one landmark at a time.

Listen to the launch episode on LU24 →

Inquiries about heritage and restoration projects: mail@santiagocaprio.com