Uploaded on 2020-08-04 by Corina Fraile

The city of Caracas has huge influence from the US when it comes to architecture, and most buildings use concrete, steel and glass panels, which I consider are also very important in the globalized architecture. This picture shows the BANAVEN center, or the "black cube", as people call it. This building is, to me, the exemplification that the construction site must be hand in hand with the design. The building itself is beautiful, those glass panels make it look like a work of art and when you're inside it, you don't feel like you are in a third world country with a booming crisi around you, you feel privileged. And yet, it doesn't work. Every office has and uses AC throughout the whole day, because the black glass absorbs the heat, which is fine for a temperate climate, but not in a city where the average temperature is 23°C all year long. If you touch the glass at any point of day, it's burning. I wanted to show this building because it's beautiful but that's not enough to make it really functional, engineers and architects need to have the context in mind when designing a building.