Gran Horizonte

A big neon restaurant sign, good food and cheerful music — this is Gran Horizonte, the installation curated by Justin McGuirk, design critic for The Guardian and director of Strelka Press and Urban Think Tank, the multidisciplinary design studio, who together won the Golden Lion for best international installation at the Venice Biennale in 2012.The space hosts the research project developed in Caracas into the biggest vertical slum in the world: Torre David.
Gran Horizonte symbolizes “the economic south looking towards a political equator that divides it from the wealthier northern hemisphere. But it also refers to horizon of Caracas itself, and the view the residents of the tower have out to the slums on the edge of the city, where they would ordinarily be living” explains McGuirk.

A victim of both the 1994 Venezuelan economy crisis, and the death of its developer David Brillembourg in 1993, the office building known as Torre David was abandoned before it was completed. Its unfinished silhouette has punctuated the city’s skyline for almost twenty years.

.Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, directors of Urban Think Tank explain “Torre David presents a remarkable opportunity for experimenting with new strategies to retrofitting existing architecture, incremental city development and mixed-use programming in vertical density. The ways in which residents have adapted the existing structure has provided us with numerous lessons about what does and doesn’t work. Residents have come up with many ideas to solve certain deficiencies, and there is a willingness to leverage this creative impulse to try larger scale experiments, some of which involve making the Torre more autonomous in terms of resource consumption and energy production.”But the pair are quick to point out that Torre David should not be romanticised: “Just like the barrios that compose a large portion of Caracas’ built environment and the slums which are a growing portion of urban development all around the world, there are real problems facing residents in terms of infrastructure, access to long-term financial investment, and of course land tenure. But it is also unique in its verticality and semi-autonomy. We think it could serve as an urban zone or site of experimentation on a large scale, partnering with academia, private firms and government to try out novel approaches to making better vertical architecture.”

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‘Torre David presents a remarkable opportunity for experimenting with new strategies to retrofitting existing architecture’

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But mainly these architects seemed to be embarrassed by the idea of the tower representing Venezuelan architecture to the world. And we relished the debate, because that tower has stood there for nearly two decades, and it’s been occupied for the last seven or so years — we had to bring it to Venice to trigger a major debate about it. That’s the power of the biennale.”

Regardless of political feeling, the superb photographic report by Iwan Baan records 45 stories of the residents living and working in Torre David. These images illustrate that, whilst the living conditions within the building are far from ideal, the sense of community it has created has generated exciting social projects, the likeof which we are unable to find in the social housing of our own European suburbs.

A book about the exhibition, done in collaboration of the ETH Zurich will be released in October, with a feature-length documentaryGran Horizonte set for release next year.