Plano del Área Metropolitana de Caracas y sus alrededores, 1954. Plan of the Metropolitan Area of Caracas and its surroundings, 1954.
different urbanizations and informal housing neighborhoods are connected, understood as autonomous alveoli. We claim that the Rotival scheme and the Moses proposal will serve as the basis for the set of regulatory plans generated by Francis Violich between 1950 and 1951 6 , confirming a linear organization and the predominance of the scale of the territory over the municipalities. On behalf of the National Planning Commission, Violich participates as a general technical consultant for the preliminary studies 7 of the regulatory scheme 7 , whose plans reveal the comparative historical growth, land use and distribution of the population of two periods, 1936 and 1950. The promotion of suburban areas, in accordance with a road plan, stimulated new centralities in the territory. According to Frechilla: "Neighborhood units, industrial zones, shopping centers and concentrated green areas will be the elements of the composition of the Caracas of 1951" (Frechilla 1994, p. 378). Its goal was to primarily control the use and development of private property, leaving public, municipal or national areas, as well as the provision of public services, in the hands of other instruments "not ordinarily included in a Zoning Ordinance, but necessarily in accordance with it" (Federal District Government, 1951). However, this plan was approved in different periods, which hindered the initial objective of "ensuring and encouraging health, safety, morality, order, prosperity, economic stability and general well-being, for present and future inhabitants" (Frechilla 1994, p. 169). One year after the approval of the Caracas Regulatory Plan, in 1952, the one for Sucre district was approved. The understanding of the city and its regulation will be finalized in 1953 with the publication of the Regulatory Plan and its respective ordinances, summarized in "many schemes and eight plans, one general plan of the city divided into the 12 proposed zones and the others partial plans of one or several zones each" (De Sola 1967, p. 89). It is important to note that the application of the construction ordinances between 1951 and 1958 produced a legal and aesthetic imbalance, in a context of disproportionate urban growth and in coexistence with provisions of previous regulations. "All this led to the
deterioration of the urban image and the environmental quality of the city" (Almandoz 1983). In accordance with the aforementioned, the topographical plan of the 1954 Metropolitan Area of Caracas and its surroundings (De Sola 1967, p. 92) shows that the city extended eastward, conquering new territories with unique residential-scale developments. The plan shows a series of isolated urban developments with irregular geometries along the central valley, disconnected from each other despite being connected by the old Autopista del Este. Generically called "urbanizations", the form and geometry of occupation and appropriation of rustic land was fundamentally defined by the organization of large tracts with compositional criteria, central places and public spaces such as squares, boulevards, promenades or roundabouts, around which pieces of modern architecture would be built definining a new way of habitation. Examples of this are the San Bernardino, La Florida, Campo Alegre, Altamira and La Castellana urbanizations, among others, composed of isolated mid-rise multifamily dwellings and single-family homes. In parallel, in areas with difficult urbanization, such as ravines or slopes in the hills surrounding the capital, informal housing areas without public services would emerge.
SINGULAR ARCHITECTURE
Meanwhile, as a result of large public investments, a "formidable official urban development initiative" was undertaken in the period of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952-58), developing the Federal District (De Sola 1967, p. 195), as it is reflected in the 1:5000 scale map of Caracas prepared by Municipal Engineering in 1956. The state made a huge modernization effort by building important and unique urban infrastructures and urbanizations, which would modify the image of the capital and define new ways of intervention and relationships between architecture and the city.
6 It should be noted that in 1951 the National Urban Planning Commission approved the "Municipal Road Plan" presented by the Municipal Works Directorate of the Federal District Government (Frechilla 1994, page 381). It carefully considered and compared the road works proposed by the 1939 Plan. 7 The plans for the "preliminary studies" where Violich participated are prior to the urban regulation, which would be published together with the ordinance in 1953.
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