FAU UCV

The Faculty of Architecture is a factory of constant spatial sensations that passively and naturally fosters creativity. In times of tension, it is already a prolific escape from reality; in stable times, an infinite pairi-daeza. Like preachers heading to a temple to maintain their purest objective essence, the ritual of celebrating and discussing architecture here is akin to recounting scenes of a film to friends.

The echoing sounds as you walk beneath the geometry of the covered corridors toward a lobby—where you pause before points of light piercing through the shadows on the floor, a sieve that channels the breeze toward courtyards that bring greenery indoors—is a pure pleasure, allowing the eye to calmly adjust its diaphragm. El Ávila mountain acts as a discreet supervisor slipping through the structure: light, tropicalized concrete frames and experimental roofs that, much like every stone of a medieval church, reveal the craft of artisanal formwork, bearing the skin marks of construction shaped by the hands of its era.

These were not robots or artificial intelligence; they were Venezuelan builders and new immigrants professionally experimenting with the construction of a modern country using their own strategies. In the tropics, the volume of air is the greatest amount of matter within a wall, inversely proportional to the thick stone buildings used to insulate against the cold in other latitudes. Within that threshold of empty matter, the tropics generate kinetic effects: constant frames of shadows, geometric modulations functioning as sundials that mark the passing months—a new dimension drawn across the facade.

Such an event must be preserved and promoted as our local identity. It is a brilliant film built in Caracas, and its cast is the light playing among the Valeras, the Manaure mosaics, a Gego Chorro, the Calder trio, the Oramas corridor, the Arroyos in Galia, a hidden Abend, Soto in the courtyard, an autograph by Corbu, Otero in blue on the tower, and the eye of Villanueva, who indefinitely inhabits a shifting script. It changes entirely depending on the circuit you choose to take to receive architecture.