Aula Magna Central University of Venezuela

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 building's design which contributed to the science of interior space acoustics, though the building exterior is also architecturallysignificant. In present-day Caracas the hall has been a site of political controversy, as well as suffering from a lack of maintenance funds. It has been named the "most important auditorium" at the university, in part because of practicality: it is the largest capacity auditorium, being able to hold approximately 2,700 people with removable seats. In the 1980s, the engineer Leo Beranek ranked the hall in the world's top five concert halls for its acoustic quality. The Flying Saucers or Clouds, a system that combines technology and art, were installed on the ceiling in 1953.