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This article explores El Helicoide and La Torre de David as remnants of the recurrent boom-and-bust cycles and spectacles of progress associated with Venezuela's ‘magical state’ (Coronil). Their redefinition as ‘phantom pavilions’—constructions designed to symbolise development but haunted by crisis and precariousness—serves as a conceptual tool against the amnesia and hysteria these sites provoke. First, I use it to track the buildings' grandiose designs, subsequent curtailment and modified uses through political and economic history. Second, the concept informs the analysis of recent artworks that summon monumentality and ruination to envisage alternate forms of public engagement with truncated sites.