Although you now live in Madrid, how do you see the new architecture in Latin American cities, particularly in Venezuela? What kind of representative role and relationship do new buildings have with the contemporary city and its inhabitants?
In Venezuela, the Chávez government’s investment in the country’s infrastructure has been purely propagandistic, with little architectural or urban value. This did not stop him leading the new urban relations created in the city. Three projects over the years are worthy of discussion: the Misión Vivienda and Misión Barrio Adentro, and Torre David.
The name of the first project stated its aim, and consisted in providing housing to marginalised sectors in enormous beehive buildings located in the main areas of the formal city. Plots earmarked for squares or prominent buildings were chosen as the location of these prefabricated buildings, making them propagandistic or even a kind of revenge against the formal city. Unlike the experience of many European cities, they were not located with sufficient urban and service guarantees to create a productive social network, but as a weapon against the urban heritage of the formal city and its social fabric. There was no gain on either side, thereby deepening the persistent social fissures in the city. These buildings have the magnified signature of Chávez stamped at the top of their façades.
The Misión Barrio Adentro mission was a social programme of medical dispensaries in marginal areas of the city, surely the best of the Chávez period, though it raises major issues. The two-storey buildings were hexagonal bare-brick modules with small windows. The dispensary was on the first floor, and the doctor lived on the floor above. The programme was controlled by Cuban doctors and built beside the pre-existing health system, with little or no communication. Despite being a star project for the government, it was developed parallel to the official health sector, operating with a traditionally marginalised population. The Cuban resident doctor lived a marginalised life inside the dispensary in an absolutely alien and, in some cases, hostile environment. I find the image of the blind hexagonal towers reminiscent of medieval times, emerging at various impossible points in the city and raising so many readings of segregation and marginalisation, highly metaphorical.
Torre David was not a government project, but it is a metaphor of the degradation and cannibalisation of the city in the midst of the Chávez years. It is the third tallest skyscraper in the city, owned by a bank that failed during the financial crisis of the nineties. The crisis helped, among other things, to bring Chávez to power. The tower was unfinished inside, with no partition walls or lifts, but it had its glass cladding. After the crisis, it was included in the bank’s assets to be confiscated by the government and was abandoned to its fate.
First, its façade was looted by sellers of glass and metals (with the incessant noise produced by breaking framed glass), and later it was occupied by influential armed groups in the wave of expropriation of private property. These groups negotiated the entry of homeless families into communities that were differentiated by floors. More than a thousand families settled there, the world’s highest squat. Bikers were organised to work as “lift operators” on unprotected stairways. The community, ranging from families who simply needed a place to live to criminals who turned the impregnable territory into a criminal den, became the fantasy of intellectuals and the media who embraced the fate of the building as a community project of the twenty-first century. The case was exhibited, in the form of a kind of idealised, liveable model, at the Venice Architecture Biennale, winning the Golden Lion. Six months later, Chávez died with high levels of popularity, the skyscraper was plunged into kidnapping scandals, and, finally, the resident families were evicted. Today, speculation about its future is ongoing.
Alexander Apóstol
