The case of the Helicoide, the fact that it was constructed above a hill that

was called the “Tarpeya Rock” is very significant because Tarpeya is

the emblem of betrayal. The Tarpeya Rock is the seventh

Roman hill from which Tarpeya was thrown for having betrayed

the city by opening the gates to the barbarians. When in Venezuela, in Caracas,

the seventh hill is named Tarpeya,

it already has an important symbolic load; after one begins to see

that the rock is cut in two, it is divided.

There are architects themselves who have told me that the problem with the Helicoide is that the spiral

girates towards the left, and not towards the right, that is, the same as the swastika, in the direction of destruction.

In the year of 1992, the Ministry

of Environment and Natural Renewable Resources, a very interesting and fairly avantguard project

that was aspired to be completed at that time in Venezuela,

was going to be implemented in the Helicoide which was going to be converted into the Ministry.

They begin, the two architects, Julio Coll y Jorge Catillo.

One of them was a chaman who had done a meditation sitting at the top

of the last level of the Helicoide to ask

and understand what was happening with all the

projects that failed. The original project failed as well as all

the other projects that came after in the 70’s and 80’s,

of converting it, of repurposing in a cultural center, of converting it

into a mall, or whatever it was. And so, they say that in one way or another

it is to be understood that there had been an indigenous cemetery in the

same plot and that, well, when it was ravaged, the Helicoide, well, they had taken on all the dead buried there, like someone would say.

And there was a change of government, and because another party came to power, it took

from their hands the environmental center and it was given to

the police intelligence directive, who

had been the one that was installed since ‘85, since 1985 in the Helicoide.

It is always thought that the Helicoide was done by Marcos Perez Jimenez. It was not done

by the dictator Marcos Perez Jimenes; it was done; it was conceived and

begun under his dictatorship, but that doesn’t mean that

it was his own work. He was doing a grand

piece beyond urbanization, all the urban infrastructure,

above all the one of Caracas was attributed to Perez Jimenez, but

this was an independent project because it was a private initiative to make a mall, and it undoubtedly

had the positive regards of Perez Jimenez, who was also there when the architectural models were inaugurated, etc.

But, once Perez Jimenez falls,

the project of the Helicoide also falls, in part

because democracy did not want to continue the project of Perez Jimenez, it wants to disengage

from a project that is related to Perez Jimenez, but also because

Perez Jimenez’s fall leaves a moment, let’s say, leaves a substantially

chaotic situation above all in the field of construction.