ABSTRACT
In the 1950s, Caracas was completing a massive overhaul that transformed Venezuela’s capital city from a rural valley with a semi-feudal society into a booming cosmopolis in full modern swing. El Helicoide’s lead architect, Jorge Romero Gutierrez, belonged to the very first class of architects that graduated from the Universidad Central de Venezuela in 1948, and helped to transform its Architecture Department into a Faculty in 1953. The gradual, piecemeal refurbishment of El Helicoide realized through different projects and by different architects throughout the decades, contributed to the building’s physical heterogeneity as services and inner partitions were installed with assorted materials according to each new activity’s varying needs and means. El Helicoide is the ultimate icon of modern Venezuela, quite an irony given that in the sixties the building’s ‘shape of the future’ would have been a striking contribution to international architecture.
