University City of Caracas

Campus of the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, Venezuela

The University City of Caracas (Spanish: Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas), also known by the acronym CUC, is the main campus of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), located in central Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. It was designed by the Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva and was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000. The Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas is considered a "masterpiece" of architecture and urban planning, and greatly influenced Venezuelan architecture. Villanueva oversaw design from the end of the Second World War, and oversaw the campus construction for 20 years. He gave his skills and also vision of design principles to it, and it remains the only university campus designed by a single architect in the 20th century that has received cultural heritage recognition by UNESCO. The campus comprises a variety of different environments; its northern half is a Botanical Garden, with extensive sports facilities at its east, west and south. There are many different areas of the campus separated by Faculty and School, including Sciences, Architecture, Humanities, and Medicine. These converge in the center of the campus at the Tierra de nadie — green space and woodland pertaining to no discipline — and the Plaza Cubierta complex of shared buildings and the titular museum of permanent modern art features. Though elements of the campus face both natural and deliberate deterioration, it remains a landmark of Venezuela, and maintains its excellence in design and planning. It has been included on the 2010 and 2014 lists of the World Monuments Fund for special preservation efforts.

The campus and buildings of UCV are considered to be Villanueva's masterpiece. Built on the site of the old Hacienda Ibarra (which originally belonged to Simon Bolívar's family) and connected to the new city center at Plaza Venezuela, the project required a massive undertaking in both urban planning and architectural design. The selected location gave Villanueva a unique opportunity to apply his conscious integration of art and architecture on a grand scale. This vast urban complex of about 2 km2 included a total of forty buildings and it became one of the most successful applications of Modern Architecture in Latin America. Villanueva worked closely with all the artists who contributed with their oeuvres and personally supervised the project for over 25 years until the late 1960s when his deteriorating health forced him to leave some buildings in the design stage. After the death of Juan Vicente Gómez, urban renewal became a large focus; Caracas saw "extraordinary urban renewal plans", including Villanueva's "Synthesis of Arts" architecture, beginning with the El Silencio complex in the city center. :56 Though the campus is unlikely to be seen as an urban project by modern definitions, it is seen as among the grand architecture that put Caracas on the map and helped to promote tourism and migration.

The campus was designated a World Heritage Site in 2000. It was designated under cultural criteria for being a masterpiece of architecture and urban planning on the part of Villanueva, being an outstanding example of practical and aesthetic architecture, and for being exemplary of early 20th Century movements art and architecture, and demonstrating their ideals. Though acknowledging that the integrity of the site is maintained in the architectural principles of Villanueva and the overall spirit of the design, the WHS program has concerns that the reinforced concrete of the structures — something that identifies the campus with architectural advances of its time — has deteriorated in the years since construction; that being prone to social unrest could provoke damage to the site; that soil erosion poses a threat to the space; and that massive student expansion opens the campus up to more deterioration and destruction, as do works undertaken to partition and reassign spaces of the campus without consideration of the architecture the works can change design and significance of, deteriorating the combined ensemble of the entire campus and working against the spirit of Villanueva's project. However, UNESCO adds that no works have compromised the authenticity or the value of the campus. There are bodies with the purpose of creating plans to protect the site, but UNESCO reports that these are disjointed and do not work together, advising that the Cultural Heritage Institute right down to COPRED — the university's Consejo de Preservación y Desarrollo (Council of Preservation and Development) — and the separate management interface of the Jardín Botánico, as well as the regional offices of Venezuela responsible for the area at different levels of government, need to coordinate. It was also recommended that a buffer zone be initiated to the south and west of the site to protect from urban developments threatening the site.