Aula Magna
Interesting facts
- After conducting there in 1957, Leonard Bernstein called it the best hall he had conducted in anywhere in South America.
- Of the 31 clouds, 22 hang from the ceiling, five line the right wall and four the left.
- Each cloud is built from two sheets of half-inch laminated wood on a steel frame, hung on cables about a centimetre thick.
- Calder saw his clouds in place only once, on a visit to Caracas in 1955.
- Even the seats were designed for sound, upholstered in wool with perforated cushions that fold back automatically.
- A folded wooden canopy hangs about eight metres above the stage to project the sound towards the audience.
- The stalls hold 1,722 seats in six blocks, with the rest of the audience in three balconies above.
- The hall was dedicated on 3 December 1953, months before its official opening by the Inter-American Conference in March 1954.
- Fidel Castro spoke in the hall during his first visit to Venezuela in 1959, and Pablo Neruda recited his poetry from its stage.
Why it is worth it
Step into the Aula Magna of the Central University of Venezuela and the ceiling seems to be full of drifting coloured shapes. These are Alexander Calder's Floating Clouds: 31 great painted panels of laminated wood on steel frames, suspended at different angles above the audience and along the side walls. They are at once one of the boldest artworks of mid-century Latin America and a working acoustic system, and they have made this university auditorium in Caracas one of the most celebrated concert halls of its time.
The hall was designed by the Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva as the centrepiece of the University City of Caracas, his vast modernist campus in which architecture, painting and sculpture were meant to be fused into a "synthesis of the arts". The Danish firm Christiani & Nielsen built it at remarkable speed, between November 1952 and March 1953. Its form recalls a Greek theatre or a conch shell, a quarter-circle in plan under a fan-shaped roof, while its exterior carries a 43-metre truss inspired by Le Corbusier's unbuilt design for the Palace of the Soviets; the building forms an integral part of the campus's Covered Plaza. The hall was formally inaugurated in March 1954 with the opening of the 10th Inter-American Conference, and it seats around 2,700 people.
The clouds came about almost by accident. Calder had been working on a piece for the plaza outside when the acoustic consultants, the American firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman, warned that the shape of the room would need extensive panelling to work. Calder proposed turning his forms into that panelling, and the clouds were hung on cables and adjusted while an orchestra played until the sound was even throughout the hall. The largest panel covers some 80 square metres and weighs around two and a half tonnes. The acoustician Leo Beranek later ranked the hall among the five best in the world, and Calder himself named the clouds as his favourite work. In 2000 the University City, including the Aula Magna and its clouds, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Getting there
The Aula Magna stands within the University City campus in Caracas, about 1.3 km from the city centre. The nearest airport is Maiquetía Simón Bolívar International (CCS), about 17 km away on the coast.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Aula Magna is an auditorium at the Central University of Venezuela. It is located within the University City of Caracas, next to the University's main library building. The hall was designed by the Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva in the 1940s and built by the Danish company Christiani & Nielsen from 1952–53. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in November 2000 for being artistically and architecturally significant. The most notable feature of the hall is its acoustic 'clouds', which serve both aesthetic and practical functions. They are an element of the hall's design which contributed to the science of interior space acoustics, though the building exterior is also architecturally significant.
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