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Known as Venezuela’s greatest 20th-century architect, Carlos Raul Villanueva
straddled opposing political regimes, cultural milieus, and architectural styles during his long and eclectic career but left no school or followers. His most significant contribution to the country’s architecture, a modernist style inflected by Venezuelan vernacular architecture and influenced by the Venezuelan tropical climate, proved too personal to be imitated. Although his residential designs are well known, it is in the public sphere— schools, housing projects, and universities—that Villanueva had the greatest effect. In particular his commitment to implementing his vision of the “synthesis of the arts” in public spaces made his work important to the Venezuelan urban context.
Villanueva began to practice his profession in Caracas in 1929 when he was appointed to the post of architect and director of building in the Ministry of Public Works under the regime of General Juan Vicente Gómez. From this period buildings such as the Plaza de Toros de Maracay (1931–33) and the Museums of Fine Arts and Natural Sciences (1934– 35), among others, demonstrate how Villanueva tempered his interest in vanguard European architectural movements with a Neoclassicism designed to appeal to a conservative elite.
The next period of the architect’s career is marked by a clearer influence of European modernism, as buildings such as the Gran Colombia School of Caracas (1939; today Francisco Pimentel), lack the ornamentation of earlier projects and instead employ molded reinforced concrete to create curving forms and masses. These buildings also illustrate Villanueva’s evolving concern with light and shadow. Demonstrating his early interest in incorporating works of art into buildings, Villanueva integrated a sculpture by Venezuelan modernist sculptor Francisco Narváez into the main wall of the school.
In 1940 Villanueva was named chief architect and consultant of the Banco Obrero (Workers’ Bank) of Venezuela, a government institution whose mission was to improve the living condi tions of the lower and working classes. One of his first projects was to remodel the neighborhood of El Silencio (1941–43), a barrio in the center of the city known for its high crime and unhygienic, poor housing conditions. With the remodeling of this zone would begin his preoccupation with urban spaces, in particular with the design of large-scale public housing. El Silencio embodied the challenges faced by Villanueva in attempting works on this scale, produced under competing interests and compromised by political circumstances.
In 1944 he commenced work on the University City of Venezuela (Ciudad Universitaria, also known as the Universidad Central de Venezuela [UCV], or Central University of Venezuela), which would not be completed until 1959. At the UCV, Villanueva achieved the apogee of his personal style, a Le Corbusian-derived, Venezuelan-inflected organicism that took as its touchstone the modernist dream of the synthesis of the arts. For Villanueva the creation of this “aesthetic consortium” would enable the city’s inhabitants to become truly integrated in aesthetic, spiritual, and functional terms, as he believed that the natural environment of painting and sculpture is “plazas, gardens, public buildings, factories, and airports: all the places where man perceives man as a companion, a partner, a helping hand, a hope, and not as a flower withered by isolation and indifference” (Villanueva, 1957, 11). Although its style has not been duplicated elsewhere, the UCV had a great effect on the course of Venezuelan architecture. In particular, Venezuelan intellectual and political elites came to see modernism as the style most appropriate for embodying Venezuelan identity, and the incorporation of works of art into buildings was an idea taken up by succeeding architects.
Concurrently with his work on the UCV, Villanueva continued his association with the Workers’ Bank and the Taller de Arquitectura Banco Obrero (Workers’ Bank Architectural Workshop, or TABO). The projects commissioned by the Workers’ Bank, beginning in the late 1940s, became larger and more frequent under the regime of Venezuela’s last dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952–58), ending with some of the largest public housing projects ever built in Latin America by the end of the decade. The most representative of these, Villanueva’s housing community “23 de Enero” (23 January 1957), originally named “2 de Diciembre,” is usually cited by critics as a turning point in the city’s growth. Because of its massive scale, it stood as a concrete symbol of the regime’s objective of eradicating the ranchos, or slums, that had sprouted on hillsides, under bridges, and in ravines in Caracas. In projects such as this, Villanueva incorporated elements from different phases of his career, such as the use of polychrome paintings as exterior decoration; window and wall treatments that protected interiors from wind, sun, and rain; and Le Corbusian–derived ideas about rational living spaces.
Villanueva’s critics describe his use of modernist styles as superficial and eclectic, and in comparison with the work of other modernist Latin American architects, Villanueva’s personal style is less fully realized. However, in context, Villanueva stands out as the first Venezuelan to combine a tropical sensibility with European modernist architecture. For this reason the UCV is regarded as Venezuela’s most important architectural monument. This, perhaps, is Villanueva’s most important legacy: the incorporation of works of art into architectural projects, particularly in the capital. Large-scale freestanding sculptures and mu-rals are found all over the city—in private office buildings, plazas, and subway stations and alongside highways—making Caracas a significant public art center on a par with New York City and Paris.
MARGUERITE MAYHALL
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3. Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.
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Selected Publications
La Caracas de ayer y de hoy (The Caracas of Yesterday and Today), Caracas: 1950
“La integración de las artes” (The Integration of the Arts), Espacio y forma, no. 3, Caracas: Facultad de Arquitectura de la Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1957
Escritos (Writings), Espacio y forma, no. 13, Caracas: Facultad de Arquitectura de la Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1965
Caracas en tres tiempos (Caracas in Three Times), Caracas: Ediciones Cuatricentenario, 1966
Textos escogidos (Selected Writings), Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, 1980
Further Reading
In addition to his own copious writings, Villanueva gave innumerable public lectures and interviews, many of which have been published in more than one venue. As a result of his significance within the architectural community, and his effect on the Venezuelan landscape, critics and scholars have published frequently on his work as well. Critical analyses of his work, however, are almost nonexistent. In addition, Villanueva’s work is not well known outside Latin America, and recent publications in English are therefore scarce. For further bibliography, see the entry on the Ciudad Universitaria.
Galería de Arte Nacional de Venezuela, Carlos Raúl Villanueva: Un moderno en Sudamérica (exhib. cat.), Caracas: Galería de Arte Nacional de Venezuela, 2 April–9 July 2000
Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, Carlos Raúl Villanueva y la arquitectura de Venezuela (Carlos Raúl Villanueva and the Architecture of Venezuela), Caracas: Editorial Lectura, and New York: Praeger, 1964
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofia Imber, Villanueva el arquitecto (exhib. cat.), Caracas: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofia Imber, 1988
Posani, Juan Pedro, Arquitecturas de Villanueva (The Architectural Works of Villanueva), Caracas: Lagoven, 1985
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