ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT ARCHITECTS

Justin McQuirk, Deezen Studio; Venice, Italy
2012, 2 min 03 sec

What can happen to an abandoned inner city office tower? 750 families can move in and live there. In Caracas, Torre David was standing at 45 stories, almost finished, when the project was left in its incomplete form following the death of its developer in 1993 and the collapse of the Venezuelan economy in 1994.

“The Torre David was meant to be a gleamy office tower. Now it’s a sky-high squat. With no elevators. For all its improvisatory resourcefulness, the settlement represents a massive failure of civic society. After all, the government could choose at any time to make the building habitable and safe. Meanwhile, the skyscraper is a modern ruin buzzing with life, a post-apocalyptic mockery of an oil-rich nation’s aspirations.”, says Iwan Baan.