Transforming a tower: an abandoned real estate project becomes a hive of self-organized activity.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities - Book review

When the Venezuelan developer David Brillembourg conceived of the Centro Financiero Confinanzas in the late 1980s, he imagined the largest private skyscraper complex in Caracas. There would be a 16-story building of luxury apartments with a swimming pool on the sixth floor. There would be a vast atrium housed beneath a glass dome. There would be a 10-level parking garage. And at the heart of it all, there would be the Torre David: a 45-story tower containing corporate offices, a high-class hotel, and a helipad on the roof.

Instead there was a bursting bubble. In 1994, four years after construction of the project began, a banking crisis crippled Venezuela's economy. The company financing the effort collapsed and the complex was never completed, although the builders were just a few months short of their anticipated finish date. The government took ownership of the site, but it didn't do anything with it--not unless you count chasing out some squatters who tried to colonize the structure in 2003. "In the heart of a struggling financial district, the Tower stood dark and silent," the architects Hubert Klumpner and Alfredo Brillembourg (David's cousin) write in a hefty new book, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities (Las Muller).

One stormy September night in 2007, a second set of squatters arrived. They had organized themselves with cell phone calls and text messages, and when they appeared outside the tower that evening, Klumpner and Brillembourg recount, "The two guards on duty took one look at the mass of drenched humanity, turned over their arms, and opened the gates." The complex has been occupied ever since. Approximately 750 families--around 3,000 people--live there today.

Outsiders often talk about Torre David as if it's a pile of squalor. "That building is a symbol of Venezuela's decline," one local told The New York Times in 2011. "What's our future if our people are living like animals in unsafe skyscrapers?" The place's reputation took another blow in 2012, when security forces searched the structure for a kidnapped diplomat. The man turned out to be somewhere else entirely, but the incident fed the idea that the enclave was a seedy blot on the city.

Yet Brillembourg and Klumpner, who have observed the community close up since 2011, see something more hopeful in the place: "a success of sorts within a failure." Their book--which features detailed diagrams of the building and its environs, stunning photographs by Iwan Baan, and...