Agosto
Diciembre
Vista de la Avenida Bolívar, Valle de Caracas, 1951. View of Bolivar Av., Valley of Caracas, 1951.
Avenida Bolívar, antes y después, en 1953. Bolivar Av., before and after, 1953.
At the beginning of the 1940s, after the formulation of the urban plan and the design of the Monumental Plan of Caracas in 1939 by Maurice Rotival, and once the disciplines, professions and institutions that serve the construction of architecture, city and landscape, and the public and private actions in urban development became consolidated, a series of linked operations of road construction, expropriations and demolitions in the foundational city center grid became possible, as well as new developments in the urban periphery and the construction of several public works. These actions culminate in 1951 with the Regulatory and Zoning Plan of Caracas proposed by Francis Violich, reconfiguring the spatial organization of the capital and its relations with the surrounding territory. During this period, as it happened in other countries, there was a shift from French urbanisme to American urban planning. In this regard, Rotival, who returned to Venezuela for two years summoned by the National Urbanism Commission, found that the capital had grown intensely "subject to indiscriminate pressure for the development of industrial land to the east … and the residential locations were being guided by purely renting criteria"². In addition, on the site where he had proposed to develop the administrative sector, El Silencio, a residential complex that emerged as a symbol of renovation in the center of the city, had been built (1941-45). As Almandoz explains, "with the redevelopment of El Silencio –with multifamily housing for the middle class in the center of the city– Banco Obrero had taken a radically different direction from the 1939 plan that proposed the placement of the entire complex of political administrative buildings of the state in that area, and Avenida Bolívar itself as the axis of the urban structure of the city".³ Rotival notes that the reality of the city differed considerably from the Monumental Plan of 1939, both in its development and execution as well as in its conception. The first proposal of rearrangement of the central urban core defined a monumental civic center on the slopes of mount El Calvario, originating a central east-west axis of almost 2 kilometers (Avenida Bolívar), which intersected with the converging roads of the west and southwest of the territory. It is worth remembering that the Monumental Plan by Rotival, administratively circumscribed to the Federal District, integrated the districts of the consolidated metropolitan city. However, beyond being an operation of the historic center, the operation of an east-west axis from El Calvario to Los Caobos Park organized residential growth and the location of industrial activities along the 20 km of the valley, while integrating the rest of neighborhoods and municipalities. The Monumental Plan, with the layout of Avenida Bolívar, would impact
the valley in its entire length, with the sense and direction that Rotival had determined. The Frenchman also observed that more than the consolidation of the Monumental Plan, the road network had allowed the integration of the large peripheral sectors of the old haciendas, as anticipated by Eduardo Rohl's 1934 plan. In this context, his planner's vision now allowed him to rethink the valley in its entirety, surpassing the limits of the Caracas center whose central grid the Monumental Plan had referred to. In this second period in Venezuela, Rotival modified the scale of academic urbanism of French origin, evidencing a pragmatic vision more akin to American planning. This evolution meant understanding the reality of a suburban Caracas in full development, or perhaps "an interest in seeing French urbanism articulated with an antagonistic urbanism rather than witnessing its demise" (Puchetti 2004, p. 23). He perceptively detected the change introduced by Villanueva in the redesign of the foundational urban core with the redevelopment of El Silencio, and proposed modifications in the architectural scale of the Federal Complex 4 (Lasala, p. 163). These measures will then be imposed on Cipriano Domínguez by the National Urban Planning Commission for the so-called Torres de El Silencio, designed in 1948 and built in 1954 as a symbol of the modern capital.
MOSES, ROTIVAL, VIOLICH AND THE 1951 URBAN PLAN
Continuing with the consolidation process of the city, IBEC Technical Services Corporation hires North American urban planner Robert Moses in 1948, to prepare the Arterial Plan for Caracas 5 . The vision of Moses and his focus on surface transportation –based on the promotion of the automobile and express roads– undoubtedly permeated his proposal, propitiating a hierarchical road system that "coincided with the (roads) of the Monumental Plan, but three express roads were proposed instead of focusing on Avenida Bolívar: Caracas-La Guaira, Río Guaira (today Autopista del Este) and Capitolio, a trench road through Avenida Baralt that would connect the two previous ones. It was the time of highways with multilevel distributors, instead of the traditional roundabouts" (Frechilla 2005, p. 196). In the same sense, Rotival introduced changes in the scale and spatial organization of the territory in 1950. The drawing known as "the lobster" shows a more complex city: its motif is no longer a monumental axis, but the vertebration of a linear east-west structure in the main and secondary valleys where the central activities are concentrated, to which the
² Negrón, Marco: "La gestación del Plan Urbano de Caracas de 1939 y su incidencia en la formación urbanística venezolana". Conversation with Leopoldo Martinez Olavarría, p. 153. ³ Almandoz, Arturo: Modernización urbanística en América Latina. Foreign Luminaries and Disciplinary Changes, 1960. 4 As for the scale and monumentality, the height guidelines for the Federal Center would later be imposed on Cipriano Domínguez by the National Planning Commission in 1949. Avenida Bolivar, Caracas, 31-XII-49. Work of unnumbered pages where Domínguez is attributed the authorship of the CSB. 5 "The arterial plan has been scantly documented and its influence on urban plans developed shortly afterwards –like the 1951 regulatory plan– is uncertain," according to Frechilla 2005, p. 194.
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