Inside The Tower of David, Venezuela’s Vertical Slum

The Torre David was supposed to be one of the tallest buildings in Venezuela . Instead, it became its most notorious slum.

The skyscraper, halted mid-construction in the early 1990s, was taken over by thousands of squatters in 2007. For years they turned the building into an informal community that was photographed, filmed and made famous worldwide as a “Vertical slum”

Today, emptied of its unsanctioned inhabitants, it once again stands vacant in the center of the Venezuelan capital, its future unclear.

The tower is part of the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, a complex of bank buildings spurred by a banking boom in the late 1980s that sought to turn downtown Caracas into a banking center akin to Wall Street.

David Brillembourg, a Venezuelan banker with the Confinanzas Group bank, led the investment in the Complex, which was to serve as its glimmering headquarters and include a 45-story office tower, an adjacent 18-story office tower, an atrium, a smaller auxiliary building, and a parking structure. Construction on the project, a gleaming, angular tower complex of glass and steel designed by architect Enrique Gómez, began in 1990.

Unexpectedly, Brillembourg died in 1993 at just 55, throwing a cloak of uncertainty over the partially built project’s future. Around the same time, the entire veneuzuela banking system began to implode, further destabilizing the large and expensive project. The financing for the project dried up, and by 1994 construction on the Centro Financiero Confinanzas stopped completely.

By some estimates, roughly 5,000 people eventually occupied the Tower of David, building brick walls and rooms and fully outfitted homes within the empty shell of the buildings. Local services emerged, including shops, barbers, and haulers willing to carry loads up the stairs to the tower’s higher floors.

Electricity and water were bootlegged into the building, and services were eventually formalized to a degree. The building itself became somewhat formalized as well.

The Tower of David once again stands empty, its last residents having been evicted in June 2015. Since then, the rumored Chinese redevelopment has seemingly fallen through. Various local ministries and officials in Caracas did not respond to queries about what lies ahead for the tower.

Potential ideas include turning it into a government office, converting it into a mixed-use development with residences, offices, a mall, and a hotel, or simply rekindling the deal with the Chinese and selling it off.

“The future of the tower is uncertain,” Machado says. Whatever comes, it likely won’t erase the memory of the roughly eight years a makeshift informal community brought unexpected life to the Tower of David.