Architect Carlos Raul Villanueva began designing the central campus complex in 1944, but the Aula Magna took shape only after substantial revisions in 1949, with the final design complete by 1952. Villanueva had an unconventional approach: he described the buildings on campus not as objects but as "movements," and the Aula Magna was Movement IV. The Danish construction firm Christiani & Nielsen received the contract on November 28, 1952, with a deadline of March 31, 1953 -- just four months to build an entire auditorium. They finished on time. In an account that has taken on the character of campus legend, when Villanueva first walked into the completed hall and saw the freshly installed acoustic clouds overhead, he threw his arms up and shouted that it was tremendous.

Calder's clouds were never supposed to hang inside the auditorium. He had originally been commissioned to create a structure for the outdoor Plaza Cubierta. But as he became aware of the complexity of the project, he proposed something more ambitious: integrating his panels into the interior of the hall to serve "an artistic, decorative and acoustic purpose" all at once. Each panel is a steel frame containing two pieces of thick laminated wood, and together they do what conventional acoustic treatments could not -- they scatter and balance sound throughout the space with a precision that influenced the broader field of interior space acoustics. Tuchman noted a paradox: the clouds are "colorfully curving and thus archetypically 'Latin American,'" yet they were designed by one of the few non-Latin Americans working on the project. That tension between origin and expression is part of what makes them compelling.

The Aula Magna has hosted far more than concerts and lectures. The Tenth Pan-American Conference was held there in 1954. In 1959, Fidel Castro spoke from its stage during his first visit to Venezuela after the Cuban Revolution. Decades later, in February 2019, student president Rafaela Requesens used the hall to rally students during the Venezuelan presidential crisis, opening her speech by describing the space itself: "This is a space of ideas, of knowledge, of plurality of thought, of freedom, of democracy, of justice." Not all events have been peaceful. In 2010, a production of Jesus Christ Superstar was attacked before the show by masked assailants with tear gas, an act of political intimidation that harmed the actors. The hall's original cashmere wool aisle carpets, chosen for their acoustic properties, were replaced with synthetic material during 1990s renovations -- a practical decision that subtly altered the room's character.

In 2000, UNESCO designated the University City of Caracas as a World Heritage Site, with special consideration for the Aula Magna's interior, which received individual protected status. But UNESCO's own assessment flagged concerns: growing student numbers, aging mosaics and concrete, and vulnerability to social unrest. Those fears proved well founded. During a protest in July 2013, a bus was set on fire in the square outside the hall, damaging an adjacent mural by Venezuelan artist Oswaldo Vigas. Students and the volunteer preservation group Copred launched a campaign called UCV SOS and raised funds to restore it, with donors including Banco Mercantil and Telefonica. Copred continues to lead guided tours of the hall to fund its upkeep. As the university puts it, the Aula Magna's "continued reason for being" is to see new generations of students graduate each year beneath Calder's clouds -- art and ceremony, still intertwined.