"At the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, Urban Think Tank presented Gran Horizonte, a ‘pop-up restaurant’ mimicking life in the infamous squatted Torre de David-skyscraper in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. This skyscraper was abandoned halfway through construction and subsequently occupied by thousands of ordinary Venezuelans who transformed it into a ‘vertical barrio’. Urban Think Tank has conducted extensive research on the building and has called it ‘a laboratory for the study of the informal’. To present their findings, they made an installation-slash-restaurant that looked like it was directly transferred from the tower, using similar building materials and aesthetics as the informal interventions. Since the Venice show, this remarkable story of an outright architectural failure and a people’s struggle for their ‘right to the city’ has gained a serious amount of attention, to the point that it has become somewhat of an architectural cliché. Despite winning a Golden Lion and the project’s apparent success, it has also been severely criticised, among others by Dan Hancox in The Architectural Review, for being a blatant example of ‘slum porn’. "