Objects of poetic reaction in the University City of Caracas
Brazilian and Corbusian influence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35305/23626097v12i23.505Keywords:
Carlos Raul Villanueva, Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, University City of Caracas, biomorphismAbstract
Based on the study of bibliographic, planimetric and photographic sources, this article focuses on the analysis of a group of buildings designed by Carlos Raul Villanueva in the University City of Caracas –during the 1950s– under the principles of Biomorphism, a renewing approach of the late 19th and early 20th century through which the predominance of objectivist and rationalist thinking was refuted and diversified, influencing architecture with a varied repertoire of sensitive, curved and irregular forms that acted as translations of the architect's imagination and his intuitive, free and poetic rhetoric. It is interesting here to trace and demonstrate the links of these ideas and those university buildings with the preceding concepts and models –such as Le Corbusier's objets à réaction poètique, introduced from painting in many of his modern architectural developments–, and their subsequent contemporary re-semanticization, also evaluating the Brazilian models, especially those developed by Oscar Niemeyer –another of the main exponents of an architecture characterized by these forms also seen as sensual and feminine– within the scope of renewal in 20th century architecture’s expressive codes.
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