The original idea was for a shopping mall with 320 stores. But the Helicoide would break the mold: Shoppers would drive, not walk, from store to store on double-helix ramps. The Helicoide would include a showroom to sell cars and spare parts, a gas station, a repair shop, and a car wash.
The Helicoide was supposed to pioneer the use of elevators that moved at an angle through its telescoping levels. It would also offer exhibition halls, a gym, a pool, a bowling alley, a nursery, and a movie theater with seven screens. Its own Radio Helicoide would broadcast activities and special offers.
But the project began to fall apart after the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship collapsed in 1958. Amid the political uncertainty that followed, the building remained half-finished. The architects lost their investment. In the new democracy, no one wanted anything to do with the project. Although it was started with private capital, its identification with the dictatorship sealed its fate.
The design continued to gather applause abroad. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition titled “Roads” that highlighted the integration of the Helicoide’s architecture and roadway design, a feature never before seen. But work on the building stopped in 1961.
Half a century later, another exhibition in New York is again praising Venezuela’s architectural wonder. The Center for Architecture is hosting ”El Helicoide: From Mall to Prison” through July 13. “One of the values of this [exhibition] has been to put this work on display again, as a structure, as architecture, as a cultural phenomenon,” said Celeste Olalquiaga, director of the Project Helicoide, an initiative to keep the story of the building alive.
“The Helicoide puts in focus what happens with modernity and democracy,” Olalquiaga said. “Because it was identified with the dictatorship, no one wanted anything to do with it. Each successive government then put it to a different use, without any continuity. In the end, they turned it into a living ruin; it’s being used even though it was partially abandoned.”
Built in the late 1950s as a state-of-the-art, drive-in mall, El Helicoide was never completed and went through decades of abandonment, failed private and public projects, and informal occupations until the security police took it over in 1985. Now a ruin, the building epitomizes modernity's utopic dreams and its dystopian reality, ultimately presenting the dark side of modernity in Latin America.
Terreform/Urban Research will launch the publication of From Mall to Prison: El Helicoide's Downward Spiral, a book about the building, in conjunction with the exhibition. Edited by exhibition curator Celeste Olalquiaga and Lisa Blackmore, the book is a profusely-illustrated history and analytical commentary on El Helicoide. (from the exhibition website)