Escuela de Ingeniería de Petróleos

The School of Petroleum Engineering of Maracaibo, at the western end of Venezuela, is framed within the expansion project of the University of Zulia, driven by the booming oil industry in those years. The building was to be located on a plot adjacent to the University Hospital of Zulia, a construction that had begun at the beginning of the decade. This area of expansion of the city, which main pole of attraction was constituted by the airport “Grano de Oro”, the Liberator headquarters and the Surgical Hospital, were to become the future University area. In this project, immediately after the core set of the Central University of Venezuela, the urban and climatic conditions are different. Neither the existing buildings, nor the future ones, are arranged by a general campus project, being the area for the time a faded grid of very low density. On the other hand, the marabino extreme climate (average temperature of 32 °C), is very different to the mild one of the valley of Caracas. However, in 1943 Villanueva had already designed and built in Maracaibo the neighbourhood unit General Rafael Urdaneta, and three years later a school within the same housing project. The School of Petroleum project is perhaps the one that in the most decisive and clear way, of those employed in his contemporary works of the University campus of Caracas, has been composed as a system. The substantial difference between the academic and modern composition, -Alan Colquhoun tells us - is that in the latter the combination of the parts is free, a set of permutations between fi xed elements that does not respond to pre-established rules, or the repetition of previous forms. Therefore, it is the freedom of combination, the absence of predetermined rules along with the creation of their own, what differentiates modern architecture from the classical one, not the absence of composition itself. In spite of that, the intrinsic relationship that the term “composition” drew with the academy, and with it the “stylistic imitation architecture”, provoked an effect of logical rejection in an avant-garde that was trying to break with everything that was previous. Therefore, this new way of projecting would have to be nominated under a different term, and as Colquhoun explains, the most antagonistic concept towards the composition would be that of the system. In this way, the building which parts are arranged amongst themselves, under a global conception of internal functioning, is the alternative to the process of “election“ of the academic method in which Villanueva was formed as an architect in Paris and which he used, although each time less, until the 40 ‘s.