CARABALLEDA RESIDENCE
Caraballeda Geriatric Residence: A Modern Legacy by the Sea Architecture by Carlos Gómez de Llarena with Joel Sanz (1973)
The 1973 Caraballeda Geriatric Residence, designed by Carlos Gómez de Llarena with the collaboration of Joel Sanz, is part of the Planchart Foundation. In their advanced age, Anala and Armando, the family that introduced the first automobiles to Venezuela, wanted to continue leaving something to the country: the Planchart Salon, their contemporary art gallery, and El Cerrito, Ponti’s Florentine villa in Caracas. New schools appeared among their ideas, but they understood that, in that historical moment, the elderly were the most underserved.
Thus, a model residence was born, featuring European ideas on elderly care: ramps, curves, and wide corridors on the foothills of El Ávila, overlooking the sea—strategies that are also part of the Meliá Hotel, which was equally entrusted to Carlos. He took on the Plancharts’ project due to the impossibility of Gio Ponti repeating the feat of designing a work of such magnitude from another continent. El Cerrito was not yet an icon of modern architecture; for the few who knew it, it was almost an Italian eccentricity. The commitment to build something new merges modern languages, as seen in the circular-plan chapel, which is zenithally illuminated by an Alejandro Otero stained glass window.
The friendship between Carlos and Armando grew as they drove down to La Guaira to supervise the construction. There is much in Caraballeda of the Villa Planchart spirit: the colors, the emphasis on details, the woodwork. In a letter from Milan, Ponti wrote that he wanted to be buried there, like Mrs. Maggi’s room, between the poetry left by her husband and the Caribbean Sea. She, one of the last inhabitants, leaves us with the phrase: “To have no horizon is to always have a future,” and recounts those clandestine meetings on the balconies, where the elderly would tiptoe to the large rooms at the prow of the building, with a balcony that evokes Alvar Aalto’s hospital or certain flourishes of Italian futurism.
Today, at 85 years old, Carlos Gómez de Llarena remains one of the most prolific architects in Caracas, alongside Jimmy Alcock; both received honorary doctorates from the Central University.
