Dra. Arq. Ana Elisa Fato Osorio
Introduction
In Venezuela the meaning of the transformations of the main cities among 1950- 1958
cannot be valued only from the physical point of view. Together with the remarkable changes in the inherited reticular urban structure of
the XVIII and XIX centuries, a restructuring process and consolidation of
the engineering and the architecture took place, aided by institutions like the Colegio
de Ingenieros de Venezuela and the role of the professionals during these years.
The political context in which these transformations were inserted is of
particular
importance for its concretion. Marcos Pérez Jimenez’s government (1950-1958) maintained
as
motto the "Nuevo Ideal Nacional”
together with the slogan of making changes in
the physical means. This Ideal was shown in the execution of public works and had as main interpreters the engineers and architects. It is during the perejimenista government that the
country was the scenario of the development of more spans in communications and of the urbanization process
consolidated as unit of organization of the Venezuelan society.
The “Nuevo Ideal Nacional” ambitious objectives could be materialized after the great
oil dynamic that, allowed the demarcation of the agrarian
and urban
structures and it contributed to the economic growth, of the public and private investment, of the immigration, the industrialization, the construction and the occupation of the urban centers.
To carry out the changes in the urban structure, the proyectual activity was aided by legal and technical mechanisms formulated inside the instances of the State. To value the participation of the professionals
in the application of the knowledge to
produce these changes on the base of
the planning, of the formulation of norms and rules for the normalization in the execution of public works
is the objective of this
report.
The changes were gestated in the main urban centers of the country. However, the process of
urban transformation of Caracas, when beginning the years fifty, was of space
meaning. In the capital of Venezuela the most important migratory process in the country
converged, providing symbol of prosperity, the concentration of the public powers in Caracas, transformed it into the scenario to rehearse the newest proposals in communication roads
and
to harbor the most modern buildings.
We will find a distancing with the traditional urban forms, of location of buildings that
limited the alliances with the modernization, by means of the creation of commissions, the writing of
technical norms and ordinances that directed the urban interventions, the
construction of buildings and communication roads with the use of new techniques and
technology. Although
this was a process that affected the main urban
Venezuelans center
notably, in this report, the same ones will be exemplified with some of the changes in the
urban structure of
Caracas, which have been considered as the most representative in the modernization of the city in Venezuela.
Toward the modernization of the city
The urban characteristics of the main Venezuelan cities until the first years of the
decade of the forty still showed inherited features of the XVIII and XIX centuries. Located
constructions on an
orthogonal layout that structured a low profile in the city, conformed by thin streets flanked by constructions that still maintained the windows and wooden bars with
covered tile in slope. Figure 1
Due to the economic conditions and correlate of the modernization an intense
constructive and urban activity was developed since 1946. The consolidation of a State
structured nationally and the high revenues that were perceived by
the exploitation of the oil, inside the frame of World War II, allowed a significant commercial
exchange that articulated
Venezuela with the world capitalist system. The modernization level was adjusted to the capacity of the State and of the growing private companies of materializing edilicias and
urban proposals in the main capitals of the country.
The first changes were structured on the base of the construction of buildings of more than two floors of
height answering to the vertiginous increase of ground prices; the gradual substitution of
the residential use, which identified the urban centers, due to bureaucratic activities
and third parties. That is to say, you began to predict the modern city to come.
The concretion of these changes took place on the base of the planning and of the
formulation of legal instruments that directed the architectural
and urban interventions of the
city. Engineers and architects impatient for the modernization, found in the planning the way of
solving the weaknesses that showed the execution of public works in the previous decades:
the improvisation, the economic waste and some administrative incongruities in
the grant of
contracts.
The Colegio de Ingenieros, institution which had been founded in 1870, participated
actively in the urban planning of the city, in its functions the direct inherency on the constructive activities was found. By the engineers and architects´ initiative of The Colegio de Ingenieros the technical
organisms that responded to the modernization process were created
and they assisted part of the objectives proposed during Marco Pérez Jimenez’s government: to build a (worthy, prosperous and strong) Venezuela and the (moral, material and their
inhabitants' intellectual improvement. Martin. 1999)1
The State should legitimate the protagonism that characterized it since the ending of the XIX century in the coordination and administration of the national public works. In the
first years of the decade of 1950 the only entity able to approach the physical transformation of the city was
consolidated, which resulted in a decisive participation in the modernization of
the academic institutions
and of the organisms
that form it.
Among these organisms we have the Comisión Nacional de
Vialidad (1945) and the
Comisión Nacional de Urbanismo (1946). Both commissions were integrated by the most important architects and engineers of the country,
mean while the Colegio de Ingenieros
institutionally contributed for its creation. It is for this reason that the professionals and the
organizations of the State were met in the first years of
the decade of the fifty to project the
changes in the urban structure of the city, by means of the rehearsal of the first practices of
planning at a national level. The Comisión Nacional de Urbanismo2; dependable in his first
years of operation of the Ministerio de Obras Públicas, had among its functions to organize, to control and to normalize the character of the metropolitan processes. The administrative legal
instruments and regulation of
the
urban public
and
private
developments were discussed3
The urban projects of the regions and populations of the country were carried out based on specific technical
analysis which included the conditions of feasibility. At the same
time, the ideology of forming urban developments in an isolated way was substit uted by the
planning that considered an urban conglomerate and (the different regions of
the country like integral element as
a whole. Martin. 1994)4.
Since 1950 the favorable economic conditions in which Venezuela was, allowed a great constructive unfolding
in the main
capitals of
the
country. The situation
was comfortable as for the supply of machineries, equipment and materials on the part of United States; this
way
the most important public works
at
national level was
possible.
The rehearsal of modern urban devices applied by engineers and architects can be exemplified in the urban transformations of the capital of Venezuela, Caracas. In the plan of
public works of Pérez Jiménez the radical
transformation
of the image
of the main Venezuelan
cities and the consolidation of Caracas as modern
capital
of
an emergent oil
country was found.
Caracas was transforming since 1946. The lands that were part of
the agricultural
production
were being occupied gradually
for residential neighborhoods. Their characteristics
that conferred the title of the "city
of the red roofs” were disappearing to assume those
characteristic of
the "great city"5: (the City of the Red Roofs is today in the route of
a great exodus. This humanity brings its own
architecture. Perhaps tomorrow, some writer could be counted among its descendants. Sat down by the window he or she will contemplate the
serene night, the wandering stars. The breeze will spread in his or her surrounding the secrets
of the past; and moved by the fondness of the sky, for the memories of
the missing gardens,
maybe could write a beautiful book.
Núñez. 1988)6
Without any doubt, Caracas began to turn out to be in its urban and architectural
structures. Its population increased vertiginously, and due to this, it extended, in 1952, from
542 to 4.256 hectares. The city grew up with urbanizations and there were necessary urban
general plans to connect the city through a designed vial infrastructure. The technical analyses
that were carried out on Caracas were supported by the hiring in the Comisión Nacional de
Urbanismo of Maurice Rotival and Francis Violich as foreign professionals with experience
in formulation of instruments and urban normative of
the Latin American cities and the
architects and engineers Leopoldo Martínez Olavaria,
Carlos
Guinand, Carlos Raúl
Villanueva, Cipriano Domínguez, Brown Edgar Stolk, Gustavo Ferrero Tamayo, Armando Vegas, Luis Malaussena, among others, as
Venezuelan professionals experts on the
characteristics and necessities of the city.
The modernization of the urban stuff deserved the demolition of a good number of inherited constructions of the colony and the XIX century, among them the reduced roads of
communication of the business district of the city together with some important constructions
that flanked them. In this way buildings were disappearing such as the Teatro Municipal, the
Escuela de Chavéz, the Edificio Junín, La Casa de Miranda, among many others. The streets
which during the colony, were identified with the names of the episodes of the life, passion and death of Jesus Christ, harbored wall constructions and rafa, covered with tile that during
the last third of the XIX century, were transforming to reflect an in agreement image with the
political function, so the constructions of the colony that were not demolished, were this way
covering of Gothic, neo-Gothic ornaments, neoclassicist, renaissance and eclectic versions.
In the modernization process the technical, technological unfolding and legal instruments for the transformat ions of the vial structure was developed to the interior of the Comisión Nacional de Vialidad. Its active participation in the urban matters reached its peak
in the years fifty:
to assist in a technical
way the primitive situation in which
were the
communication roads, was one of its objectives: (to elaborate a general plan that includes highways, railroads, waterways, marine and air roads, of national, state and municipal
character, keeping in mind the technical and economic and financial aspects, and clo sely coordinated with the development plans and development of the production and with the
points of social and military views. Memoria del Ministerio de Obras
Públicas. 1946)7
The Venezuelan vial system gives a balance at the present time of
the significant
progresses as a result
of the modernization. The intention of facilitating the flow of the capitals during these years resulted in the application of
the
most advanced techniques for its
realization on the part of
the engineers. Result of these big operations of infrastructure vial is the Autopista Regional
del Centro, the Autopista Valencia-Puerto Cabello, and the Autopista
Caracas-La Guaira. In each one of them big earth movements were intended, the use of technical equipment as mechanical shovels, the application of the mathematical calculation on the geographical knowledge of the diverse sectors to allow a less outing and the use of
minimum
slopes. An entire technical
and technological operation in the road projects was
carried out on the part of Venezuelan engineers together with the participation of specialized foreign engineers.
For the first time, in Caracas, there were rehearsed the construction of freeways
and big avenues as elements of quick traffic with which were granted characteristic of "great city", in correspondence with the consolidation of the automobile as a device of emblematic communication of
the modern life in the country. There the professionals demonstrated their technical knowledge, of
design, technical knowledge of calculation on the Autopista del Este
(1951-1956), built in the periphery of the city in order to connect the business district of the city
peripherally with the East part; in Avenida Bolívar (1953) that would have as primordial
objective to connect the city center with the emergent residential areas located toward the east
of the city and, later on, in the avenues Urdaneta, Fuerzas Armadas, Sucre, San Martin and Nueva Granada (1953-1959). These new roads were characterized by
bifurcations in
the ends with streets in diagonals, parallel and perpendicular, different levels separating circulations and circulation channels and return vials, among other urban elements. Figures 2 and 3
At the time that the traditional urban stuff was transformed the formulation of legal instruments accorded with the changes were concreted. These instruments were studied and approved by
the commissions constituted for it inside the Colegio de Ingenieros.
In these
years this institution participated openly in matters of the national life.8
With the endorsement of the Colegio and the modernization of the organizational
structures of the State, as the Comisiones de Vialidad y Urbanismo, the engineers and
architects tried the most modern urban devices: they
reconsidered the retirements of the
constructions related to the axes of roads in proportional increase to the widths of
these; new
heights
were established for the constructions and population's densities for square meters. As design strategy a system of use, a general plan and a zone for the main cities of the country was proposed; in the mean time, technical studies were carried out and the application
of modern technologies, design methods
and calculation for the construction, were considered.
Among these instruments one can find the elaboration of Proyectos de Ordenanzas y Plano de Zonificación for Caracas in
1951 and 1954, together with the Plan Regulador; the writing in 1953 of the first technical norms and regulations for the use of the armed concrete;
the technical analysis in 1957 of low quality steel used in the constructions in Venezuela. That
is to say that during the years fifty a technical and legal answer was
given for the organization
and the building of new constructions in the city with the purpose of representing the level wanted by the "Nuevo Ideal Nacional”.
The formulation of the Plan
Regulador
of Caracas in
1951,
elaborated by
the Comisión Nacional de Urbanismo, is one of the proposals of
engineers and architects which,
after being approved, allowed representing in good part, the level
of
the "Nuevo Ideal Nacional”. It was an instrument that though did not consider the social and productive rationality of the "great city" as the urban structure, it pretended to plan the urban thing
starting from the technical
description of the city. Uses of the floor, prices and type of
property, population's forecast, programs of public and private investments, space distribution of
activities and functions were constituted on the base to plan the Venezuelan capital in twelve communities ideally with sectored work places in certain
areas, green and recreation areas, articulated by freeways, avenues
and streets.
The Plan Regulador, the legal and technical instruments, had their effects in the lack of
organization with which Caracas began to be formed such as a "great city." Certain
contradictions among the different legal instruments, impacted in the lack of organization of
the city. However, from the architectural point of view the possibility to build constructions
of more than five floors of height, combining residential, commercial uses and services in a
same group, particularizing the location of the buildings related to the orthogonal ways of the
urban plot, opened the action scope in the elaboration of projects for the architects.
There are countless examples that the history of
the architecture counts with in Venezuela among 1950 -1958. Nevertheless, in Caracas two icons of the architecture exist with which one can represent the process of city modernization, in the same ones the ideas of
planning, the application of legal
and technical instruments converge, while the newest technologies were used for their construction, they
are the Centro Simón Bolívar and the
Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas.
The architectural proposal of the Centro Simón Bolívar (1949-1952) like one of the
symbols of
the new modernized city, on the axis of the great Avenida Bolívar, conceived according
to the proposal of the Comisión
Nacional de Urbanismo.
Several
downtown
squares
were
demolished
for
their
construction since
1949.
In this
architectural
urban complex there were combined administrative, commercial and services activities, without bigger considerations on the traditional reticular plot. The proposal contained underground
roads that allow the communication among the off streets, on which two symmetrical towers
of up to 30 floors of height rest, where the practice of the most modern projection and calculation methods were rehearsed by the architect Cipriano Domínguez and a team
of specialized engineers. Figure 4
To give a new urban structure to Caracas, according to the modernization of the country became the panacea of
engineers and architects. The construction of
the Ciudad Universitaria (1944-1958) by Carlos Raúl Villanueva is a statement of it. An audacious
urban proposal in which a group of dispersed buildings on a great surface is articulated by a vial
system and curved roofed corridors and built wavy armed and pre compressed concrete. The operation
proyectual not only contemplate the use of materials and modern technologies, but
also diverse devices of environmental conditioning even the convocation of diverse national artists and foreigners in order to implant sculpture and painting works in
the urban group.
Figure 5
Architects and engineers in
the modernization
The role of the engineers can be valued as decisive in the passage from the tradition to
the modernization of the city. An ideology change among engineers and architects is evident in the decade of the fifty; they were able to stay
active in an outstanding way in the architectural means. They expressed a masterful
domain in the linguistic signs of the architecture of the XX century, in the use of materials, in the application of
technical norms and regulations.
In the first three decades of the XX century the architecture had as responsibility to rescue the national identity and the presumption of ordering the society. The appraisement of
elements of the colonial architecture given that consideration of this as revival, by means of the recurrent use of patios, corridors, arches, tile roofs and bars on windows were one of
the
recurrent characteristics. At the same time continuity
was given to the characteristic
eclecticism of the XIX century, using the elements according to the architectura l typology, the neoclassicist was used this way in the constructions that should represent the power of the public institutions, elements of
the medieval architecture in the military constructions, the neomorisco in some popular housings of the El Conde and San
Agustín in Caracas, among
some others.
Since the decade of the fifty the architecture was distanced from the codes with which could stay
the harmony and the order of the previous traditional times. The metropolitan
experience of
unity of objects and anonymous production of buildings are ignored by the architects who state the necessity to demonstrate their responsibility in the projects these
years.
Such a situation in the professional exercise of the architecture does not seem to be
adjusted to the transition process in which
the Venezuelan cities are in the modernization
required of a dynamic in the edilicia production characterized by the production in masses industrialized with agile construction processes that allowed building the biggest number of works in the less possible time. However, in the years fifty, the architects affirm the avoiding of this dynamic to produce modern unique pieces.
Indifference was shown this way by the architectural legacy and the urban inheritance of the XVIII and XIX centuries
and to preserve
the
identity of the urban centers.
The
engineers and architects assumed the role of interpreters of the modernization and of the
applications of the Venezuelan State, with the production of architecture with its own characteristic in one of the most important moments for the history of architecture and the
urban thing in Venezuela.
The same architectural production of the architects Cipriano Domínguez (1904-1995) and Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1900-1975) show the incidence of
the modernization in the activity proyectual and it can be exemplified with the characterization of the work of the
architects Cipriano Domínguez and Carlos Raúl Villanueva. Domínguez, Doctor in
Physical
Sciences and Mathematics
of
the Universidad Central de Venezuela since 1928, he carried out
post-grade studies in the Ecole Speciale d´Architectue up to 1933. In his first works he shows
an
approach to the use of the neocolonial and of the prehispanic one,
mentio ned in the building for the Passengers Terminal of San Antonio's Airport (1944) in Táchira State, the country property house with corridors. Villanueva, architect of the Ecole des Beaux-Art since
1928 rehearsed in 1945 in the urbanization El Silencio, the disposition of constructions around generous patios, while the front of the buildings were adapted to the neocoloniales codes:
potbellied
columns,
arcades
in the
piazzas,
portals in the main
accesses, among other
elements. Figure 6
The work of both architects shows the adaptation that is made of
the transition from
the
tradition to the modernization. Producing an architecture able to interpret the socio-
political and economic Venezuelan development, by means of the instrumental articulation of
the functional with the artistic, they moved to the production of a representative architecture
of the knowledge, singular characteristic, which were distanced from
the rationality, the massive production of objects and the non identity with the traditional
thing innate of the big cities.
The condition that Caracas experienced in the years fifty accused of the architectural unity as an answer to the technique and the distancing between the architect and the user of its productions. However, the architects persisted in the idea of
producing buildings like the old
artisan, that is to say, to stamp to the work a condition of singularity particularizing the way of producing it. For the German sociologist of the modernity
Georg Simmel (1858-1918) in
one of the most important rehearsals that treat the topic of the "great city", the man "reacts
with his head, instead of doing it with the heart"9, the intellectual architect who develops hisprofessional activity in the conformation of "the great Venezuelan city" shows the continuing reacting with the heart as long as non assimilation of the traffic from
the tradition to the
modernization of the city.
Conclusions
The correlate between the modernization processes and the urban
and architectural
transformations is aided by
the planning and the formulation
of
legal instruments as control mechanisms and normalization of the urban and architectural interventions of the Venezuelan
cities. The years fifty
were characterized by important changes in the social, economic, political and cultural structures, in this scenario
of changes, the engineers and architects
carried out their role as interpreters of the modernization in Venezuela. That is how starting
from this role commissions were created where the most important urban projects and the
architecture operations were gestated, impregnated in
new techniques, materials and location
ways, at the time that adjusted to the legal control mechanisms molded as alliances with
the modernization.
The devaluation of the urban structures precedents to the XX century became evident
in
the use of modern urban devices as avenues and freeways that were articulated with the
characteristics of a modern life. In addition, the architectural production became a vehicle
which architects expressed new constructive forms, at the time that they demonstrated their
capacity to produce pieces with heterogeneous architectural codes as long as their work was shown as exclusive product of each one of them, in a moment in which the accumulation and
the industrialization did not maintain alliances with the "exclusivit y."
 |
Figure 1. Plane of Caracas, 1946
 |
Figure 3. Process of construction of the Avenida Bolívar
 |
| Figure 4. Centro Simón Bolívar. Aerial Vista |
 |
Figure 5. Escuela de Ingeniería. Universidad Central de Venezuela
 |
Figure 6. Urbanización El Silencio
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___ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __
1Martin Frechilla, Juan José. Planes, planos y proyectos para Venezuela: 1908-1958. UCV, CDCH, Caracas, 1994, p.
112.
2The activities and the projects carried out by the National Commission of Urbanism have
been object of
critics and questioned as for the impact of the transformation proposals on the
cities. However, that it is not the matter of interest on this
presentation, but the contribution of this Commission on the modernization of the the city.
3See: Martín, J. J. (1999), “El urbanismo como disciplina para la modernización: Caracas,
1870-1958”, pp. 178-183 in: Juan J. Martín, Yolanda Texera (Eds.), Modelos
para
desarmar. Instituciones y disciplinas para una historia de la ciencia y la tecnología en Venezuela, UCV, CDCH, Caracas.
4JJ. Martin. P.
139
5The term "great city"
corresponds to the identification that is made of the city in constant transformations product of the dynamics far from the passive life, the traditions, and the
customs. The changes are shown in different scales in the Venezuelan cities and they can
never be comparable with the processes experienced in the big Capital. However, when in this
work the "great city" is mentioned it refers to the urban space affected by
the new structures
that do not accept bucolic behaviors neither the actors' interventions that participate in it.
6 Núñez, Enrique Bernardo. La ciudad
de los techos rojos. Monte Ávila, Caracas, 1988, p.
279.
7 Memoria del Ministerio de Obras Públicas. 19 de Octubre 1945 a 1 de Octubre 1946. P. 13
8"an alive entity, creator of plans and ideals that are beneficial for the country, and we will
only be able to achieve it stimulating its activities until reaching the most important mission
that it is commended, like it is the creative continuity in benefit of the country, representing
that which is capable the enthusiasm and the effort of an union willing to conquer ideals." Palabras del
Dr.
Paoli Chalbaud en la toma de posesión
de la Junta Directiva. Revista del Colegio de Ingenieros. No.
230. May 1955, p. 3
9AA.VV. La soledad del hombre. Monte Ávila, Caracas, 1985, p. 103.
