De la boîte de Le Corbusier al cubo de Villanueva: el Pabellón de Venezuela, Montreal.

Anyone who knows the Boîte à Miracles, before knowing the tales that arise that suggest Le Corbusier’s drawing as an inspiration for Villanueva, at once intuitively understood that the Montreal Pavilion was in debt to this concept of the empty box or magic box, beyond the simple drawing and its architectural sensation, the geometric thing that the Swiss architect defi ned. Villanueva’s interpretation becomes even more faithful to the original idea of a box of miracles, than that developed by the inventor himself in his various versions, a recurring idea in evolution from the beginning of his career. The tendency towards what is simple is an inclination of the spirit, it is “the sign of command” explained Le Corbusier. A tendency that would be translated into one of the four types of the modern house, represented by the Villa Stein in Garches: “[…] a rigid case, absolutely pure. A diffi cult problem, perhaps a pleasure of the spirit [...]”. This building, small and ephemeral, liberated from the social load -in its quality of basic service- which should govern architecture and keep, despite of its experimental nature, the key to Villanueva’s last architecture. Defi ned by some critics as a “zero moment” of his career, a re-start, is for us exactly the opposite: the distillation of certain principles long matured and succinctly explained. The project of the petroleum school of Maracaibo, is the link that shows the progression in the construction of “an ideal form, without anything useless, so logical and so pure that no signifi cant difference existed between the roof, walls and natural spaces”. This desire of Villanueva is always preceded by the idea that: “The building has signifi cance only for the content that it shelters”. Nevertheless, there are situations in which a changeable or nonexistent content -as in the case of the Pavilion- requires an empty box. The utilitarian principle of the building minimized -the contents-, its form and its construction will be the main problem to solve