The Eyesore And Torture Chamber In Venezuela

Presenting, in honor of Nicolás Maduro, El Helicoide — or the Helix — in Caracas, Venezuela, the regime’s temple of pain. . . a prison and torture facility run by the National Intel Service of Venezuela,

Wikipedia sez: “Its construction was undertaken by a private company during the government of then-president Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1956, designed by the architects Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez. The project was to have included 300 boutiques, eight cinemas, a heliport, a 5-star hotel, a park, a club of owners and a show palace on the seventh level. The building would include a four-kilometer long ramp spiraling around the structure itself, allowing vehicles to enter the building and park inside.”

Weren’t those the good old days? Wannabe hyper-consumerism! So quaint! The project was exhibited as a triumph of modernist design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Salvador Dalí offered to decorate the interior.

Under construction in the 1960s !

Alas, it was soon cancelled, abandoned, and just sat, a dreary vacant dirt and cement ziggurat, inhabited by squatters, for more than a decade. In 2010, it was turned into the headquarters of the National Experimental Security University dedicated to training state police forces. You kinda wonder what kind of experiments they were running in there. From there, the experimental techniques that proved successful were applied to the ongoing political situation, and the prison / torture facilities were added. ¡Ahí lo tienes!

In various revolts, coups, rebellions over the years, the building has suffered bomb damage, but none of that has improved its outward appearance. What’s next for this fabulous building, with Sr. Maduro on his way to a life sentence in some federal slammer. My bet: a super-hyper-casino! Yeah, go for it! Sports book where they used to do the waterboarding! Three cheers for adaptive re-use!

James Howard Kunstler is an artist and investigative journalist.