Architectural minimalism’s best example? The Villanueva’s Pavilion case in 1967

Abstract

This article presents a critical revision about the Venezuelan pavilion for Montreal’s Expo 67. It proposes an architectural analysis, examining this pavilion on the base of its eventual links with Minimal Art (or Minimalism), simultaneously evaluating the written constructions in the media, spread through important publications of national and international scope. These particular readings about the work and its author lead to the study of the referential universe that constituted part of Carlos Raul Villanueva’s interests, which determined the essence of the project and the realization of this building. The employed method corresponds to the one used in documental studies, proper in a historical research and based not only in the revision of the subject’s bibliography, but also on the critical reading of the articles appeared in newspapers, magazines and publications around the world, promoters of a particular and free interpretation. At the end, the detailed revision of the pavilion and its author permits a reasonable comprehension of the real conditions expressed in this work, allowing us then to dismantle the rhetorical construction about its minimalist identity. Such interpretation came from an early quick, superficial and partial reading of this exhibition architecture, an opportune sensationalism produced in response to the recent novelty of Minimalism —the newly sketched tendency by the epoch’s critique—, a fact that was widely replicated as transcendental news through the international media apparatus. Such distortio was kept in time, acting as the legitimate discourse of the pavilion, and displacing its true corbusian artistic and architectural identity, a referential gene of much of Villanueva’s projects and realizations since the 50s.