Parque Central is a complex of two 56-storey octagonal towers — the tallest buildings in Venezuela — surrounded by five 44-storey apartment blocks, built between 1970 and 1983. The design, by Daniel Fernández Shaw, was meant to be a city-within-a-city: housing, shopping, museums, theatres, and offices on a single brutalist concrete podium connected by elevated walkways.
The Torre Este caught fire in 2004 — the worst high-rise fire in Latin American history — and stood gutted for more than a decade; its slow restoration is still continuing. The complex houses the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, the Galería de Arte Nacional, the Children's Museum, and the Teresa Carreño Cultural Complex. The interior plazas and walkways are the modernist counterpart to the colonial centre — heavy concrete, cantilevered walkways, a 1970s vision of urban density that has not aged kindly.