From the gallery to the corridor building: walking through Villanueva’s work

Abstract

While functionality in contemporary architecture, does not have the prominence that it achieved in modern times, it remains a fundamental element to be considered in practice, although the maxim of “form follows function” has been replaced by more complex relationships. In fact, if the conceptual expression of functionality in contemporaneity is very diverse, so was it in modern architecture, reflecting a great variety of singular relationships between form and function, marked, among others, by the particularity of the architect’s evolutionary thought, for the constructive technology and its materiality, and, in other cases, even for the conditions of the place. This article highlights the variability of this relationship, even in the production of the same architect, and for this, it focused on the analysis of a basic function -the circulatory-, in the work of the Venezuelan modern master Villanueva, an analysis that revealed at least 6 different ways in that relationship.