Comparing+and+Contrasting

Comparing and contrasting

Urban planning and architecture, they are both careers that walk together because they both design inhabitable spaces, but at the same time they have a different vision of the world and how to shape it. Urban planners have more of a macro vision of the terrain they are about to shape, while architects, focus on single buildings or areas such as squares. However, if we take a closer look, both urban planners and architects take care of the inner business of their works, urban planners take care for example, of the public transport and the traffic circulation, while architects take care of how people move or adapt themselves to the buildings. In my opinion, it’s just a matter of scale, both professions have basically the same purpose; they design inhabitable spaces, only they do it in different scales and with different objectives. No wonder why urbanism used to be a background of the architecture profession.

Caracas is a modern city. It has been used as a specimen cup for architects and urban planners because it was a growing city with lack of construction rules, and the few ones it had were easy to bend. Knowing that, architects and urban planner from all around the planet came to Venezuela to let their minds fly, and so a city with multiple and complex styles was born. In architecture, Carcas has a combination of modern and colonial styles, in a ordered chaos shall I say. As you walk in it's streets, you can find yourself confused with the constant change of façades from bricks to glass, from glass to concrete and from concrete to bricks. From the urbanistic point of view, Caracas has been planned to held massive amounts of vehicles, with long wide straight avenues and hightways, but that plan and those calculations were developed about 50 or 60 years ago. It has changed a lot from those days, now there is little solutions for the numerous traffic jams that happens every day and the unfinishing lines of cars.

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