Plano de Robert Moses (Fuente: Docomomo). Plan by Robert Moses (Source: Docomomo).
CNU AND PLANNING SCHEMES
The goals of the administrations after Isaías Medina (1941-45) were made possible by the modernization of the academic, professional and administrative platform leading to planning, recognized as state competence in the 1947 Constitution, without detriment to private property and initiative. (Geigel 1994, p. 23). At the same time, in keeping with the Americanization that had penetrated all levels of Venezuelan society since the end of the Second World War, the monumental urbanism of the lopecista epoch was over (Almandoz 2006, pp. 346-350). Although the former Directorate of Urbanism (DU) of the Federal District Governor's Office survived under different names until 1948, the governing board entrusted the planning of the main cities to new institutions of national scope. Created by the same decree on August 10, 1946, the Department of Urban Planning of the Ministry of Public Works (MOP) and the National Commission of Urbanism (CNU) were samples of the importance acquired by the new discipline in public administration (Geigel 1994, p. 80). The CNU had several members of the former Technical Commission of Urbanism (CTU), such as Leopoldo Martínez Olavarría, Luis Malaussena, Edgard Pardo Stolk and Carlos Raúl Villanueva. However, thanks in part to the actions of Martínez Olavarría as president, the CNU would tend to replace the European orientation of those veterans with an American style urban planning (Martín 1996, p. 184-187). In this sense, one of the first advisors appointed by the CNU was Francis Violich, who came from the Faculty of Architecture of Berkeley. The newcomer immediately noticed a "rebirth of ideas" among the novice local
engineers and architects, who expressed "an eagerness to demonstrate their yet unused abilities" in urban planning, after having studied abroad or at the School of Architecture of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, created in 1941 and with a first class graduated at the end of the decade (Violich 1975, p. 280). Sponsored by Nelson Rockefeller, Robert Moses was also present in 1947, author of the Arterial Plan for Caracas Project (González Deluca 2013, pp. 121-122). And since the end of the 1940s, Maurice Rotival was again an international consultant, returning in 1946 and, unlike during his stay in the previous decade, he proclaimed the benefits of American regional planning. However, the members of the CNU realized that a difference persisted between the "macrocosmic" planning conception of Rotival and the "microcosmic" vision of Violich. The former seemed to promote a fast approach or methodology, which could select basic factors and formulate hypotheses without knowing the whole situation to be planned. Violich, on the other hand, brought a method based on the detailed knowledge of the zones as the main resource for formulating instruments of urban control (Martínez Olavarría and others 1983, pp. 64-66, Martín 1991, p. 106). Despite his preaching as a planner, something of the intuitive French approach of Rotival the urban designer still resonated. As Violich himself confessed decades later: "He had a concept of urban design, of regional design, as if regional planning were an art" (Martín 2004, p. 136). There were also some reverberating traces of monumentality in
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