Downward Spiral: El Helicoide's Descent from Mall to Prison edited by Celeste Olalquiaga and Lisa Blackmore
UR (Urban Research), 2018
Paperback, 268 pages

If any decade could be called "the driving decade" it would definitely be the 1950s. Domestically, it encompassed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which saw the federal government pay for thousands of miles of highways, many barreling through cities. In turn, buildings downtown had to be designed and reconfigured for the automobile. One bold example, which was proposed in 1959 and built five years later, was William Tabler's "Motor-Pool Hilton" in San Francisco, which wrapped a hotel around a parking garage; people could drive up the ramp and park right next to their room. But a look at the building disappoints, since the automotive aspect driving the design -- turning it into a hybrid between a hotel and a motor lodge -- is hidden. To see a true auto-architecture around the same time, one would have had to travel to Caracas, Venezuela, to see El Helicoide de la Roca Tarpeya, a spiraling mall carved from a hilltop, where shoppers drove up the ramp to the shop they wanted to patronize.
[El Helicoide de la Roca Tarpeya, 1965. Photo: Paolo Gasparini]

I learned about El Helicoide last year when the Center for Architecture displayed the small, one-room exhibition El Helicoide: From Mall to Prison. I wrote about the exhibition for World-Architects after attending a tour given by curator Celest...