Brutalism in Venezuela

Venezuela's oil wealth funded one of Latin America's most ambitious modern building programs, and by the 1950s Caracas was already a showcase of concrete modernism. The brutalist decades produced structures of remarkable scale and ambition, from spiraling commercial megastructures to monumental cultural complexes set into the dense capital.

The unfinished El Helicoide de la Roca Tarpeya (1960), a drive-through spiral mall by Jorge Romero Gutiérrez, is among the most extraordinary concrete buildings anywhere. Tomás Lugo Marcano co-designed the Teatro Teresa Carreño (1983), a terraced concrete theater complex, while the towers of Complejo Urbanistico Parque Central (1979) were long the tallest in South America. Modern concrete cathedrals by architects such as Erasmo Calvani extended the idiom into sacred architecture.