/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/ ARCHITECTURE-VENEZUELA: A University Campus for Humanity

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Andrés Cañizález

CARACAS, Dec 27 2000 (IPS) - The University City in the Venezuelan capital is on of the three modern urban developments declared as a Heritage of Humanity by the United Nations Scientific, Cultural and Educational Organisation (UNESCO), a distinction granted on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the site’s creator, architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva.

The campus of the government-run Central University of Venezuela, the nation’s top institution of higher learning, received the special UNESCO designation earlier this month.

Such recognition makes the Caracas University City the third modern urban development to be declared a Heritage of Humanity site, following the city of Brasilia and the Bauhaus construction in Germany.

The status covers the 50 buildings and more than 100 works of art that can be found on the 220-hectare tract of land that makes up the campus, a project that took 15 years of work and was guided by Villanueva who died in 1976.

“The University City is an indivisible structure. There, the landscape, the green areas and the construction are conceived as a unit, which is blessed with a force of composition and a sense of totality,” commented architect William Niño.

The Venezuelan capital’s university complex is an open-air museum that unites the works of international artists such as Henry Moore, Fernand Leger, Victor Vasarely, Jean Arp, Wilfredo Lam, Alexander Calder, Baltasar Lobo, and of Venezuelans like Alejandro Otero, Pascual Navarro and Francisco Narváez.

“Villanueva integrated the arts, but he also integrated Venezuelan artists with world artists,” pointed out the Caracas daily, ‘El Nacional’.

The Venezuelan architect “took the utopia of modernity to its limit through the experience of an open museum that is fully integrated with the city”, Niño affirmed.

“This allowed an important number of artists to develop through the project of integrating the arts with architectural forms, as had never been done before in the West,” he said.

Villanueva, for whom “life was what was translated through architecture,” according to critic Juan Pedro Posani, began in 1944 to design the University City, which was officially inaugurated a decade later.

The work is traversed fluidly and penetratingly, in a rich and potent spectrum, and expresses its own characteristics, which are elasticity, movement, continuity and dynamism, wrote Villanueva about his epic project.

“There has been born, in effect, a new space, a new spatial sensation that is very different in its content, more dynamic, more active, more human,” added the architect, who also designed ‘El Silencio,’ an urban project, and the buildings of the Fine Arts and Natural Sciences museums, all located in the Venezuelan capital.

The university authorities announced that they have a budget of 12 million dollars earmarked for maintenance and for meeting some of the UNESCO requirements, including rehabilitating some spaces to their original design. Rector Giusseppe Giannetto reported that the four focus areas of these efforts are: landscape, road and walkways, electricity and waste removal.

The UNESCO declaration of the University City as a Heritage of Humanity site has brought with it the government’s decision to return the Botanical Garden and other spaces that were originally part of the campus to the hands of the Central University of Venezuela.