January 2026 | Eyesore
"Would you like a red-hot poker with your acid bath, señor?
Presenting, in honor of Nicolás Maduro, El Helicoide — or the Helix — in Caracas, Venezuela, the regime’s temple of pain. . . a prison and torture facility run by the National Intel Service of Venezuela,
Wikipedia sez: “Its construction was undertaken by a private company during the government of then-president Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1956, designed by the architects Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez. The project was to have included 300 boutiques, eight cinemas, a heliport, a 5-star hotel, a park, a club of owners and a show palace on the seventh level. The building would include a four-kilometer long ramp spiraling around the structure itself, allowing vehicles to enter the building and park inside.”
Weren’t those the good old days? Wannabe hyper-consumerism! So quaint! The project was exhibited as a triumph of modernist design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Salvador Dalí offered to decorate the interior.
Alas, it was soon cancelled, abandoned, and just sat, a dreary vacant dirt and cement ziggurat, inhabited by squatters, for more than a decade. In 2010, it was turned into the headquarters of the National Experimental Security University dedicated to training state police forces. You kinda wonder what kind of experiments they were running in there. From there, the experimental techniques that proved successful were applied to the ongoing political situation, and the prison / torture facilities were added. ¡Ahí lo tienes!
In various revolts, coups, rebellions over the years, the building has suffered bomb damage, but none of that has improved its outward appearance. What’s next for this fabulous building, with Sr. Maduro on his way to a life sentence in some federal slammer. My bet: a super-hyper-casino! Yeah, go for it! Sports book where they used to do the waterboarding! Three cheers for adaptive re-use!
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It's got that no-one-can-hear-you-scream vibe.
That building's creepy
"Have You Seen Of The Most Frightening Building In Caracas? It's Called El Helecoide. Numerous Reports Of Torture And Murder Have Been Documented Inside It, Yet Maduro's Fans In America Deny Them All. They Deny His Atrocities Because To Admit Them Is To Risk Being Called A 'Coup Simp,' Or Worse. A New Hashtag Is Going Around: #AskAVenezuelan. But American Progressives Prefer To Insult Them" -- Celia Farber
https://celiafarber.substack.com/p/have-you-seen-of-the-most-frightening