Old industrial buildings adapt surprisingly well to modern purposes. The 19th-century woolen mills along Route 128 in Massachusetts became high-tech offices and laboratories. Brick warehouses south of Market Street in San Francisco have been converted into trendy condominiums.

In the little town of San Augustín, near Oaxaca, an abandoned yarn and thread factory has been beautifully refurbished and is now used as an art center.

They don't make 'em like this anymore, do they? Looks like a county courthouse. The factory as monument.

In the early decades of the last century, hundreds of workers trooped up those steps to work for less than a dollar a day. Today it provides paid employment for maybe a dozen residents of San Augustín: custodians, maintenance workers, guards, administrators, who provide all the services needed to make the place function as a museum, a gallery and a place for art-related events.

This summer, the first floor is being used for an exhibition of contemporary ceramics—cerámica utilitaria—pottery. But what pottery!

The work on display is not folk art, not pedestrian crafting by amateurs. These are serious works worthy of deliberate appreciation.

Half the second floor houses a temporary showing of drawings, which don't particularly appeal to me. But the room they are in does. The unused half of this floor is empty, permitting an unobstructed view of this incredible space.

The high roof is new, the rest is original. The wonderful rank of arched windows, the scarred oak floors, heavy enough to support massive iron machinery, the absence of posts, create a vast, open space capable of displaying works of any size without crowding them.

In the center of the second floor, some of the huge old bobbins, still wound with yarn, and a couple of looms have been left to mark the building's original use.

They are installation art in their own right.

Other examples of incorporating the old industrial facilities into a compelling design include retaining the old incinerator, now surrounded by a reflecting pool.

Another part of the pool contains a drift of submerged ceramics: more architecture as art.

A whimsical staircase leads to the thorny trunk of a ceiba tree.

Empty, this place would be worth visiting on its own merits. Containing as it did, an exhibition of extraordinary ceramics, I found my attention hopelessly, but happily divided.