The Image of the threshold permits the exposition of two aspects of the work presented here. The University City of Caracas realized by the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, and which was involved, without prior incubation or later consequences, in the C.I.A.M. debate, lights some aspects of its crisis, evidenced in the first post war meeting: on how to put into practice the model of the functional city and the place of aesthetic problems in modern architecture.
The chronicle
The plan to develop a new campus for the Central University of Venezuela and a new General Clinic Hospital for Caracas started in 1942. A coordinating commission of ministerial representatives, amongst whom Carlos Raúl Villanueva was included, on behalf of the Ministry of Public Works, established the hospital program with the counsel of Edgar Martin and Tomas Ponton Consultants, from Chicago, and decided to build a 1250 bed Clinical and Public Health hospital for the University City; on a proposal by Dr. Armando Vegas, a location was chosen at the 375 acre Hacienda Ibarra, at that time on the outskirts of town.
The commision undertook periods of studies in the U.S.A. and in the recently created University City at Bogotá 1. This visit contributed to a decision appointing a single professional team for the project, due to the lack of unity observed in the colombian city´s complex. The designation fell upon architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, who worked alone, assisted by draftsmen and technicians during the years that the construction of the main buildings, covered walkways and open spaces of the University City took place.
Initially, and with the hospital as starting point and reference, the complex is articulated axially, within academicist modes and compositional forms, and the medical disciplines are aligned on the axis, through the Rectorate's Propylaeum, closed on the west with the hospital and on the east with the Beaux Arts Schools, bordered by a Science complex to the south and Humanities to the north. From this disposition a central plaza was derived.
After his return from France in 1929, Villanueva, faced by the Venezuelan medium's social and political conditions, kept within the academicist tradition, postponing, but explaining as a "cultural tactic", the modern adhesions he recognized 2. But his parisian sojourn from 1937 till the middle of 1938 due to his developing the Venezuelan Pavillion at the Paris International Exhibition, reveals some significant clues: He undertook studies in the Institute of Urbanism and had the opportunity of encountering themes and participants at the V th Congress of CIAM. The importance of this trip and the contacts he established, coincide with a greater commitment to the principles of modern architecture, and make us believe Villanueva was subject to some intellectual change: The 1939 Gran Colombia school in Caracas seems to have been witness to this, attaching itself to modern French architecture and especially the work of Robert Mallet-Stevens. In this train of ideas, his two big projects, the urban complex at El Silencio in 1941 and the first project for the University City in 1944, are an outcome of his capacity to manage the grands ensembles, gained during his first training at the Ëcole des Beaux Arts in Paris.
But the situation that allowed a deep transformation in the preexisting academicism of the University City was due largely to political factors. On November 24th 1948, the democratic government of Rómulo Gallegos is overthrown and a military junta assumes power. The University City Institute, created on October 2nd 1943, changes its authorities, until on February 28th 1950 Captain Luis Damiani is named President of the Institute and Dr. Daniel Ellemberg, Director of the Projects Department, entrusted to oversee the development of the project on behalf of the provisional government according to the postulate of the "New National Ideal", an imprecise enunciation of progress that pretended to explain its modernizing ideas with an ambitious public works program 3. Thus, the 1944 academicist plan of the University City was modified, was "modernized" , marking a turning point in the public undertaking, since it was placed in a zone of "low cultural pressure" that facilitated, in an open, public and official way, the development of modern architecture in Venezuela.
The project underwent substantial modifications in its development, that undoubtedly accompany Carlos Raúl Villanueva's design process. But, in the measure that the complex was modified, the original plaza lost importance, since the rectorate, resited with its facade northwards, created a new plaza, presided by the symbollic Clock element; Finally, the emplacement of the Paraninph, the Aula Magna and the Central Library will produce as a result the celebrated Plaza Cubierta, built in the stage corresponding to the years 1952-54.
None of this was due to a program more systematic than the personal decision to "break" and be "organic", as his assistant Juan Pedro Posani comments. They were free interpretations culled from his readings and voyages and had little to do with theoretical and critical discourses. Villanueva said: "I don't like closed forms. I am interested in all inputs. All the new forms and the new contents, from wherever they come, stimulate me. I reject the value of doctrinaire dogmatism, worried about fixing limits, of separating essences, of jealous discrimination" 4. This overflow of open eclecticism witnesses the particular sensitivity of Carlos Raúl Villanueva towards the Venezuelan colonial architecture, towards his own projectual experience, towards "all things".
The result of this operation struck the attention of Venezuelans and foreigners. In this respect, Hitchcock mentioned: "The newest area of architectural achievement in Latin America is Venezuela [...] the advance of Carlos Raúl Villanueva to a leading position in Latin America can easily be read. His Olympic Stadium and his Aula Magna with its attached Plaza Cubierta are among the most vigorous examples of modern architecture to be seen anywhere. Indeed to many, accustumed to associating Latin American architecture with the grace and lyricism of the Carioca architects, the vigor of Villanueva's exposed concrete may appear almost brutal. The organization of the University City, while more compact and human in scale than that of Mexico's, is less clear and geometrical". 5
The thresholds
Notwithstanding the importance and significance that the University City has in Venezuelan life, it can be of interest to analyze the role that this experience has played in the international debate, and especially within CIAM, in the search for alternatives that could permit the survival of its founding statutes.
At this point it is convenient to note that the Caracas University City experience dealt with two subjects in the program of the VII th Congress at Bergamo: "Cases of the application of the Athens Charter" and "Synthesis of Plastic Arts", in recognizing that the principles of modern architecture could not be bound by rigid functionalism. 6
A case of application of the Athens Charter
The Bergamo Congress was dominated by Commission I presided by Le Corbusier, where ASCORAL presented the Grid, largely because the Athens Charter needed to be on scene in relation to the urgency of European reconstruction. This way, the CIAM members were submerged in apparently more pressing and scientific problems, which Giancarlo di Carlo undertook to decipher: "While a war-desvastated world was in the grip of reconstruction problems, CIAM discussed the usefulness of the grid, how to employ the grid, the best way to pack the grid". 7
In this context, the building of university cities in Latin America placed on front stage CIAM town planning within a dimension that transcended the plane of desires. A special Latin American historical circumstance has created specific conditions for the development of a rationalist urban model: The modernization of the university system that will transform its humanist tradition in order to upstage science and technology, adapting itself to the new directives of progress and the new roles assigned to the Latin American society.
The undertaking of a functional utopia found an appropiate field to fulfill its wishes, and the Latin American continent opened generously to experimentation: the CIAM projects in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, as also Venezuela, were the expression of a modernizing will, whilst indicating continental permeability to the new architectural and town planning culture.
The opportunity of intervention with an isolated and autonomous system, as to a mirror image, was real in the Latin American University Cities of Río de Janeiro, Tucumán, México, Panamá, Santo Domingo and Caracas. The road systems, the Civic Centers, the hierarchy of functions, the recreational and sport areas and the buildings for education and for scientific research and technology show the disposition of a rationalist city dominated by harmony and the order of an in vitro experience, where the population was formed by a rigorous age selection that comprised the youngest section of the active pyramid. This theoretical genocide allowed for a special behavior of the urban simulacrum, because the real city does not exist; the housewives, the children, the old people were absent, it was like an army bent on labors of teaching and learning, where the reality of the world was present only as a case for study.
If Le Corbusier's Rio University City was presented in volume three of his Oeûvre Complète, in the ¨L'organization des villes ¨ chapter there were no doubts about the sense of this experience. Intentions these which have crisscrossed the continent searching the fulfillment of modern utopia. Carlos Lazo, charged with coordinating the University City of Mexico declared: "....the transplantation of the University to the University City can not be seen as a simple removal or a simple architectural event, or as a problem of building techniques. It was necessary to assume and confront a planning problem that took into account the physical, human, economical, political factors. Because at the end what was being built was a real city, a city of learning and knowledge.....". 8
Thus, Carlos Raúl Villanueva, during the period between the years 1949 and 1954 develops the university program that includes student housing, service centers, sports and recreational areas, research institutes, Faculties and the Communal-Administrative Center: The New University was installing the functional program of zoning; housing, leisure and work, linked by a circulation system where pedestrians strolled protected by galleries, out of immediate contact with cars, enjoying the vegetable scenario of the planters. In synthesis, additionally, the Green City. It was a complete experience, a possible " case of application of the Athens Charter", in spite of the fact that the year in which the VII th Congress was convened was not yet over.
Synthesis of the Arts
It is an attempt to formulate aesthetic problems within the CIAM after the VI th Congress at Bridgwater in 1947, on the basis of the statements and preoccupations of professor Sigfried Giedion and others at the time that Le Corbusier expressed that "finally Imagination has penetrated the CIAM", as an acknowlegment of modern architecture's crisis manifested by its protagonists.
"In Bridgwater we introduced the discussion of aesthetic problems into CIAM" Sigfried Giedion declared, although by that time there was tremor about the risk of talking of aesthetical questions and only the British group MARS was convinced about it. 9 The initiative was applauded by Le Corbusier, denouncing "...After twenty years ... I have found the conviction...that what will come.... is the re-formation of individual conscience. It is the personal experience, it is the private undertaking... The first machine era has sown chaos... Wherever is disgrace, unsufferable ugliness, a defeat of grace, of the smile, wellbeing evaded!" 10 After this Congress, the MARS group, Jean Arp and Sigfried Giedion ellaborated two questionnaires that were submitted to the Council Committee. The survey expressed the anxiety of the CIAM members to approach an aspect of the Avant garde's crisis. 11
Nevertheless, in 1949 the discussions on the theme could not arrive at any conclusion due to the multiplicity of approaches presented; between the art of the "man in the street", the social needs, the acknowledgement that "...today 'thinking' is easier than 'feeling'...". Certainly, art and aesthetical problems had become impregnated with the ideological confrontation between East and West. Le Corbusier informed that next year he would open in Paris a Permanent Center for Plastic Arts, directed by himself. 12 In this manner, his Oeûvre Complète mentioned: "The task which Le Corbusier undertook was to create at Porte Maillot, ground which was provisionally loaned by the town of Paris, 'the architectural conditions' into which painting and sculpture might be introduced. This was to be offered to certain artists to be named by an Association of the Plastic Arts". 13
Finally, in the VIIIth Congress, the theme of architectural aesthetics was reopened, directed towards the qualitative aspects of architecture and urban space, specially in the the epicenter of collective activities. Quality, a notion denied in the metropolitan thinking of the Avant garde, retook its legitimacy in architectural dialogue.
José Luis Sert, in the prologue to "The Heart of the City", mentioned that the lack of the question of quality in the CIAM discussions, dominated up to the moment by technical reproductibility, needed a reformulation: ".... the majority of modern architects have felt well enough that the epoch of rational architecture, whose sole preoccupation was to clean houses of old artifacts and express the practical function, is over. Today there is a clear trend to more plastic liberty, to a fuller architectural vocabulary. 14 Le Corbusier, in his conference " The Heart as meeting place of the Arts" formulated the aesthetic dimension in sociological terms: "The Heart as a place for the expression of life". 15 And finally, he ellaborated with the Brazilian architect Lucio Costa, a document concerning to synthesis of arts, at Venice in 1952. 16 The retreat from rationalist positions of the Avant garde was evident, but the alternatives proposed invited a leap in the dark that few were ready to risk.
In this way, the description of the "Synthesis of the Arts" into the CIAM was destined to solve aspects of architectural and urban quality. These intentions of artistical synthesis had little to do with conciliatory nostalgia, with the integration of fragments, in truth it was pure realism in the search of qualities, and never went beyond simple urban decoration. The examples that could be cited were not sufficient nor too convincing: Gropius spoke about his experience at Harvard with the conviction that collaboration between architects, painters and sculptors should begin. At this same time, Giedion commented the "too late" cooperation of Jacques Lipchitz's sculpture in the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro. 17 The French critic, Guy Habasque, commented: "the writings and declarations are, really, more numerous than the realizations. Works such as the De Vonk house by J.J.Oud and Theo van Doesburg in Noord-wijkerhout (1917), the famous "De Unie" café by Oud in Rotterdam (1924-1925), the Schròder house by G.T.Rietveld in Utrecht (1924) and the L'Aubette café-cinema in Strasbourg (1926), due to the collaboration by Theo van Doesburg, Sofia Tæuber-Arp and Jean Arp, have a certain importance... in truth only the essays of integration in the University City of Caracas and the Gelsenkirchen Theater have given positive results...". 18
The theme was already present and Villanueva, specially with the help and stimulus of Sigfried Giedion and André Bloc, had introduced the "Synthesis of the Arts" in the University City of Caracas. Giedion expressed his acknowledgement of his effort in the search for artistic cooperation and recommended names. 19 He commented: "In spring, Fernand Leger had me meet in Paris, the Venezuelan architect Villanueva, who erected the new University at Caracas, capital of its country. He asked me what modern sculptors, since it included them only, he should call as collaborators. Amongst others, I mentioned Arp, Calder, Antoine Pevsner. Today a plastic work in bronze, of striking proportions, by Pevsner rises where it corresponds, in full view of the public" 20 Meanwhile, André Bloc had proposed the realization of urban, public and collective art, becoming a true consultant to the university project. 21
Villanueva undertook the process of the artistic cooperation project that had France as its main site. In effect Villanueva made frequent trips to Paris visiting the studios of the Venezuelan group from the generation of Los Disidentes -a group of abstract painters- established in this city, the members of André Bloc´s group Espace and the group of artists suggested by Sigfried Giedion. Guy Habasque explained Villanueva´s procedure: The principle of close collaboration adopted by Carlos Raúl Villanueva for the university city in Caracas, offers [....] an excellent example of what should be an absolute rule. Even though the architect was limited in his action by the artists´ distance and the imperative postponements in execution. Having, from the beginning chosen the artists with which he counted on working - Calder, Leger, Pevsner, Arp, Vasarely and Laurens - and foreseen in advance the conditions of their participation, he concieved a preliminary design, which was submitted to the consideration of the interested parties [...] Back in Caracas, he assembles all the projects and builds models that were later submitted to the artists´ consideration. Voyages, studies and discussions were even more numerous in respect to the ceiling of the Aula Magna, for which Villanueva, Sandy Calder and the acoustical engineer Robert Newman adopted a working system absolutely as a team. 22
Villanueva wondered at the reasons of the ¨Synthesis¨ in the same terms employed in the CIAM debate: "¨What are the reasons that artistic integration, at present, proposed by the architects and by the painters and sculptors, as one of the objectives to be attained most immediately?. The reason, in our mind, resides in that the architect, for one, wants to deepen the significance of his architecture, searches a greater enrichment of its plastic worth (...) On the other hand, the painter and sculptor are just emerging from a personalist and individualist tradition, in order to enter in another that announces human intervention as a symbol of social coherence, of human and collective sympathy, as a responsible framework (...) The integration (...) is the product, not only of the comprehension of common goals, but also of the necessary subordination between the different expressions (...) The natural environment of artistic works are the plazas, the gardens, the public buildings, the factories, the airports: all the places where man looks upon man as a companion". 23
But, at the same time that the theme of artistic synthesis was formulated as a mechanical and immediate solution for the crisis of architecture, Villanueva´s experience transcends this search. Together with it, there is another aspect that permits its value as a work to be understood. Its specifically achitectural trait, the ¨intermediate space¨. The threshold, in the most direct sense of the term, that finds its maximal expression in the Plaza Cubierta, there, where the ¨Synthesis of the Arts¨ is also to be found.
I believe it pertinent to add that the particular mode of generating shaded public spaces refers to the creation of intermediary spaces and that this is the conceptual matrix of the edifice. The walkways, as well as the patios, access areas and plazas are covered or partially shaded by overhangs, and barely bordered by screened walls. These configurations create new spatial conditions: they are neither outside nor inside, and their continuity throughout all the complex does not allow the limits of the architecture to be defined, a situation which is present in detail in each of the buildings.
In this way, the University City is a totality that repeats its matrix, as also its fractals, in different sizes and complexity. Undoubtedly there are relations between the Plaza Cubierta and the Plaza of Ten Thousand Imperial Palms in Le Corbusier's Rio de Janeiro University City project; in the shaded public spaces at the University of Rio Piedras extension; or with the covered plaza with reinforced concrete parasols for the University of Tucumán, but in the case of the University City of Caracas it is not the technical aspect of the cover that is so striking, being, in effect, simple, but the quality of the space generated: the thresholds. This intermediate space is not simply a formal response to the rigors of the climate or the force of the tropical rains: it constitutes in Villanueva a dimension of unsuspected richness.
From this perspective, the University City is charged with special value, because its spaces seem designed as an unending search of dynamic shadows. ln the Plaza Cubierta, the highest concentration of this poetic dimension is produced: Four meters high and people assembled, preceded by an ample corridor that antecedes the library, two meters ninety five, that could be three meters, and people moving. Irregularly formed overhangs, fragments of sky illuminate the sculptures and murals, lines of light signal planes of light screened by hollow blocks drawing eternal geometries that compete with an art of a finite time; later, at the maximal tension, the Aula Magna -hermetic precinct- explodes, opens to the concrete's sky, acheiving, as Tanikazi said, Paradise in the shadows to be found behind the material presence of the woodwork. 24
Dissolutions
The year in which Carlos Raúl Villanueva finished the Communal Center of the University City the IX th CIAM was held at Aix-en-Provence, and the crisis was about to explode. The case of a ¨Heart of the City¨ and ¨Synthesis of the Arts¨, at the end of the CIAM debate, had nothing further to do or say. In effect the experience of the Integration of the Arts, the persistent and deliberate play of ruptures of symmetries and axialities in the placing of the volumes, the structures and the half covered spaces, the crudity of the materials and their special encounter with climate and nature that is observed in the works of the University City, represented a discourse that made the permissivity and heterodoxy of modern architecture manifest, as an extraordinary contribution to disconcert.
Thus, Carlos Raúl Villanueva´s experience in the University City is placed between two thresholds, without ¨culture media¨ nor later ¨turbulences¨: unforeseen outcome of a crisis, but without future consequences in the international debate. In effect, when Villanueva builds the second part of the University, when in Venezuela the ¨cultural tactic¨allows him to unravel the 1944 academic program and speak clearly about modern architecture, the work had already transcended these frontiers. The paradox was that the undertaking, more than establishing bases, started the dispersion of Venezuelan architecture, but also took part in the general dispersion of modern architecture.
Caracas, Abril de 1996.