Venezuelan Political System

Inspired by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and capped with a Buckminster Fuller dome designed by Donald Richter, Venezuela’s spiraling concrete Helicoide once seemed destined to consolidate Caracas’ reputation as a modern Latin American capital. Constructed in the late 1950s as a futuristic shopping mall with 2.5 miles of vehicular ramps, customers would not walk but circulate with their cars along 320 stores, exhibition halls and state-of-the-art facilities featuring inclined elevators and close-circuit television. The goal was to implant modern consumer culture in Caracas and catapult Venezuelan society into the First World.

The project faltered mere months from completion and the building’s unfinished ramps were relegated to the backdrop of the city’s southern slum-covered hills. Despite myriad private and public attempts at recovery, El Helicoide has known only two uses: first, as a temporary refuge for almost ten thousand people in the late 1970s; then as a police headquarters and penal institution from 1985 on. Today it houses hundreds of political prisoners and has gained international notoriety as a torture center.

Downward Spiral is the first book to address El Helicoide’s extraordinary architecture and complex cultural history. El Helicoide is presented here as a living ruin, with its paradoxical status as half-abandoned, half occupied site that bearing witness not only to one of the most outstanding periods in Venezuela’s architectural history, but also to the social and political upheavals that modernity has entailed.

Celeste Olalquiaga and Lisa Blackmore, Editors
Contributors: Pedro Alonso, Carola Barrios, Ángela Bonadies, Bonadies + Olavarría, Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, René Davids, Liliana De Simone, Luis Duno-Gottberg, Diego Larrique, Vicente Lecuna, Engel Leonardo, Albinson Linares, Sandra Pinardi, Iris Rosas, Alberto Sato, Elisa Silva, Federico Vegas, Jorge Villota. Designed by Álvaro Sotillo and Gabriella Fontanillas.