In a backward Venezuela which was starting to get rich on oil, the Central University campus owed its development to Villanueva's determination to produce a work of spontaneous density and opulent simplicity. In this extraordinary creation, simplicity would be saturated with the riches offered by art and by the perennially exuberant vegetation, and would come to life through construction techniques and materials inspired by a sense of the poetic.

Villanueva touched the sublime after ten years of searching for ways in which academia and modernity, realism and abstraction, could live in harmony, and from this marriage was born the ambiguous beauty of the Faculty of Medicine, combining academic syntax with the language of early European modernism, enlivened by American balconies and terraces. Following these initial explorations came the more strictly modernistic incursions of the Engineering Faculty, as evidenced by the play of the ever-varying prismatic blocks asymmetrically distributed in the site. Sublimity took possession of the setting in the fifties when the architect's maturity yielded responses that would stir the individual's perceptions, and when these perceptions took on a public dimension.

The pleasant shock caused by contemplating the buildings of the fifties on the Caracas campus reveals the aesthetic synthesis of the expectations of a time and a place, and suggest that Villanueva stands among the great creators of the twentieth century, despite the fact that his work is relatively unknown.

The discrete initial structures, finished and usually inlaid in the walls, began to acquire bolder forms which gave way to exposed concrete porticos, solid and robust, contrasting with the daring projections of the early fifties. The great structures of the Central campus, such as the stadiums and the large halls, along with the roofed passageways that link the different parts of the university, constitute the explosion of tectonic art in Villanueva's architecture and are one of the fundamental aspects of his encounter with the sublime.

In addition to the ongoing conception of the support requirements of the building in terms of structural poetics and the attention given to construction materials and processes as protagonists of an integrated world in which art played a leading role, the Master Builder was concerned about the environment, the climatic conditions and the atmosphere which had been evolving. He also confidently revived traditional elements of Latin American architecture which had their origins in the colonial heritage, such as balconies, corridors, small squares and screens to modulate light and attract the veiled glance to the interior. This in turn coincided with the revival of some of the ideas of the European avant-garde of the twenties, along with admiration and respect for the work of Le Corbusier, with whom he formed a friendship.

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