Originally built to be the world's first and only drive-in mall, El Heliocide in Caracas, Venezuela was abandoned before completion. Since 1984, it has been the headquarters for the country's secret intelligence police force (xpost r/bizarrebuildings)
malgoya on June 5th, 2017 at 12:21 UTC »
El Heliocide | Caracas, Venezuela
It was supposed to be a drive-in mall, the only one of its kind, where drivers could spiral up and down, parking right in front of the business of their choice. It was halted shortly before completion; then abandoned to a fate that included oblivion and decay; multiple failed governmental projects; occupation by squatters and intelligence police; and episodes of drugs, sex, and torture; all sources for an endless number of legends, each more fascinating than the last.
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Here's a brief history:
In the 1950s, the combination of thirty years of oil revenues and a dictator, General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, bent on modernizing Caracas, made Venezuela into a haven for foreign architects looking to express their creativity.
In 1955, the owner of La Roca Tarpeya, a 328,000 square-foot hill, wanted to build a lucrative commercial development. A modern shopping mall, “El Helicoide: was designed to include large exhibition halls; an automobile showroom; a gym and swimming pool; restaurants; nurseries; discotheques; a giant cinema; a first-rate hotel; a heliport; and a full system of internal access with diagonal elevators and mechanical stairs
And then it all came to a halt—a slow, gradual halt that took everybody by surprise and from which El Helicoide never recovered. In January 1958, Marcos Pérez Jiménez was overthrown. Construction actually began in October 1958, under the provisional military government of Wolfgang Larrazábal, which allowed the building to go forward as long as its developers hired a large number of unemployed workers, part of a national emergency plan. They did, and El Helicoide roared on with 1,500 men working in three shifts round the clock for the next year and a half.
It was democracy that dealt El Helicoide its fatal blow. How exactly this happened is still unclear. Some blame the newly formed government of Rómulo Betancourt, which, unwilling to continue and thus legitimate the dictatorship’s massive urban renewal of Caracas, put conditions on a line of credit that had previously been granted to El Helicoide. The company balked, embarking on a lengthy legal dispute that would end only in 1976 when the empty building became state property. End of story for El Helicoide, the mall.
During the next twenty years, the construction that had made international headlines stood in almost total silence. To their credit, local governments attempted to save the frozen giant. One after another, administration after administration proposed different commercial, cultural, and commercial-cultural plans, twenty-seven in total
One plan did get under way, giving some life to the building’s empty halls—if we don’t count the massive occupation by squatters from 1979 to 1982, that is. Spurred by the official relocation of five hundred landslide refugees in El Helicoide in 1979, small groups began to install themselves in the building. By 1982, the unfinished structure was home to some twelve thousand squatters, all living without basic services in an economically depressed part of town. The building became a zone for trafficking in drugs and sex, with attendant high crime rates. This situation was literally washed away with hydraulic force in 1982 to open the way for the Museum of Anthropology.
The Museum of Anthropology plan managed to finally place on the complex’s roof the Buckminster Fuller dome, which had been stored for over twenty years at a local warehouse. It didn’t get much further however and plans for the museum scrapped.
During the remodel in 1982, The four high-tech Austrian Wertheim elevators,—each capable of carrying thirty-two people and designed to move diagonally on a thirtysix degree incline along the hill’s slope at a speed of 6.6 feet per second—were found at Venezuela’s main port, La Guaira, languishing away incomplete. They had arrived with great fanfare two decades earlier, but by 1982, very few people even remembered what those enormous machines actually were.
Soon after the museum plans were abandoned, another type of occupant began to install itself. Starting in 1984, the Venezuelan secret intelligence police (then DISIP, now SEBIN) gradually began to establish its headquarters in El Helicoide, the perfect panopticon with a 360-degree view of Caracas. A new kind of darkness set upon the building.
Here's an album with pictures plus more while it was under construction
h8speech on June 5th, 2017 at 12:42 UTC »
Wow, it's an actually evil building. Much creepier when you know what it is!
erhue on June 5th, 2017 at 14:50 UTC »
Nowadays in Venezuela, this is one of the places where political dissidents are jailed. There are many stories about torture. Hope this ends soon.