Born in London to a Venezuelan diplomat and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Villanueva returned to Venezuela in 1929 and spent forty-six years building the country's public architecture. His career divides cleanly. The early work is historicist and stage-managed — the neo-Mudéjar bullring at Maracay of 1933, built for the Gómez regime — and gives way through the El Silencio housing scheme of 1942–45 to an outright modernism tuned to the tropics: deep brise-soleil, perforated screens, covered outdoor rooms, concrete left as struck. From 1944 he devoted himself to the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, where he pursued the síntesis de las artes, commissioning Léger, Arp, Vasarely, Calder and Venezuelan artists to work inside the architecture rather than on it. UNESCO inscribed the campus as a World Heritage Site on 30 November 2000.
