El Helicoide is one of the strangest buildings in Latin America — a 100-metre-wide pyramid in the San Agustín district, wrapped in a continuous double-helix concrete ramp meant to function as both road and parking structure. Designed by Jorge Romero Gutiérrez, Pedro Neuberger, and Dirk Bornhorst in the late 1950s, it was meant to be a futuristic shopping mall: every shop with its own car park at its door. Construction stalled with the 1958 fall of Pérez Jiménez and the building was never finished.
After decades of squatter use it became, from 1985, the headquarters of the secret police. Today it is the most notorious detention site in Venezuela, with reported torture cells in the lower levels. The architecture is internationally famous and the subject of multiple academic studies and the documentary El Helicoide; the building itself is impossible to visit and unsafe to approach. Look at it from a distance, from the Avenida Roosevelt or the Bellas Artes overpass.