Torre David is an incomplete skyscraper in the center of the Venezuelan capital Caracas that has been occupied and reconstructed by local residents. Work on the building, named after the financial investor David Brillembourg, who died in 1993, was suspended during the Venezuelan financial crisis of 1994. After the office tower-- the third highest in Venezuela--had stood empty for many years, it was taken over by the local population in 2008. The occupants made the building their own with improvisation and skill--it is a "vertical favela," now containing not just housing but also other everyday facilities such as an improvised doctor's office, shops, and more. Photographer Iwan Baan has documented Torre David and its occupants, creating a portrait that captures the contradictions of the place while at the same time revealing urban structures that have emerged dynamically and without planning. Alfredo Brillembou rg was born in New York in 1961. In 1993 he founded Urban-Think Tank in Caracas, Venezuela. Since May 2010, Brillembourg holds a chair in architecture and urban design at the Swiss Institute of Technology, Zurich. Hubert Klumpne r was born in Salzburg in 1965. In 1998 he joined Alfredo Brillembourg as director of Urban-Think Tank in Caracas. Since 2010, Klumpner holds a chair in architecture and urban design at the Swiss Institute of Technology, Zurich. Iwan Baan, born in Alkmaar, Netherlands, in 1975, is an architecture and documentary photographer. His photographs feature regularly in such journals as Domus, A+U, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and others."

Urban-Think Tank (U-TT), an interdisciplinary design practice emerging from the turbulent political environment of Chávez-era Caracas, has pursued projects in Latin America, Europe, and Africa for almost twenty years. Their diverse work positioned the ��rm at the forefront of a social turn in architecture in the late 1990s, with concrete urban interventions encouraging social cohesion in the megacities of the Global South and Europe’s evolving metropoles. U-TT has also produced numerous media projects that harness ��lm, theater, exhibitions, and print to create new discursive spaces and question how our cities are shaped, and for whom. Most notable is its work on the squatted skyscraper for which the ��rm shared the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2012. This book looks forward as well as back, imagining new spaces for a hyper-urbanized world and gaining insight from informal settlements, spatial play, and artistic interventions in public space.