Two years ago, “Urban-Think Tank” won the Golden Lion with their project about the occupied Torre de David in Caracas. Now the involuntarily iconic, half-finished office building monstrosity is being vacated. We asked the team’s partners for a swan song to a project.
Two years ago, “Urban-Think Tank” won the Golden Lion with their project about the occupied Torre de David in Caracas. Now the involuntarily iconic, half-finished office building monstrosity is being vacated. We asked the team’s partners for a swan song for the project:
As we work on this article, we are following a Venezuelan news report about the Torre de David. The government is planning to evict the tower block, relocate the residents to new social housing and find a new use for the building and land. Refurbishment plans for high-rise buildings do not normally attract much national, let alone international, attention. But the Torre de David is no ordinary skyscraper and its future is the subject of speculation all over the world.
The Torre de David, officially known as the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, is a 45-storey tower in the business district of Caracas, occupied by around 750 families. The building was originally intended to house a luxury hotel, a shopping center and the headquarters of the major bank of David Brillembourg, the real estate investor. When he died in 1993 and there was a national financial crisis the following year, the building, which had only been completed in its shell, fell into the hands of a government insurance company. The company left the building derelict – right in the heart of a district that was once to become the Wall Street of South America.
Seven years ago, citizens from various poor neighbourhoods came together, organized themselves via social networks and occupied the tower. Everything happened peacefully – they simply walked past the security guards who were supposed to be guarding the tower. The reason for the occupation was the need to escape the dangerous slums of Caracas, a city where around 40 percent of the population live in neighborhoods that were built without official planning.
They occupied the tower at a time when, thanks to the political climate of the time, real estate laws had been relaxed and many similar projects were springing up across the city. What the squatters created without official recognition was comparable to a social housing project emerging from a grassroots movement. They began to extend the skeleton of the skyscraper with the simplest of means.
Gradually, apartments and infrastructure were built. Recreational areas and small stores were created. Everything was well organized, not least due to a mixture of autocratic hierarchy and democratic process culture. Although most of the residents used the rhetoric of the prevailing chavism, the leaders of the new community did not succeed in obtaining a permanent right of residence.
We were convinced that we could learn something important from the residents and what they had created in the seven years of their occupation of Torre de David. What we found was neither a stronghold of crime nor a socially romantic utopia. The Torre de David has the complexity of a city: the strict grid structure of the construction enables informal adaptation of the building – and it demonstrates how the inventiveness of the residents can solve urgent urban problems without the involvement of state authorities.
We can only hope that the planning process will be democratic and transparent and that the building’s economic and social potential, which is still far from being fully exploited, will be incorporated in a sustainable way. A repurposed Torre de David could become a successful model of urban development that intelligently combines official planning and resident participation.
In some ways, the Torre de David is an anomaly – the result of hapless real estate investment, a series of severe economic crises and populist politics. However, it also stands for larger developments, first and foremost the worsening housing crisis of the urban precariat. But it also stands for the will of people not to come to terms with the given circumstances and to look for their own solutions.
A single building can never be a panacea. But if we understand the lesson that the Torre de David teaches us, then perhaps in future we can find more creative answers to the most pressing issues facing our cities today.
“Architecture and event” – more about the Torre de David from November 1 in Baumeister 11/2014
Photos: Iwan Baan, AFP/ Leo Ramirez
