Heliopolis Olympic village concept by VAL, 1968–74

The Slovak artistic-architectural group VAL [Voies et Aspects du Lendemain, or ‘ways and aspects of tomorrow’] was founded by artist Alex Mlynarčík (b. 1934) and architects Viera Mecková (b. 1933) and Ľudovít Kupkovič (b. 1943). During the socialist period, they proposed utopian projects that they called ‘architectural poetry’.
Their best-known work is ‘Heliopolis’, an Olympic village to be built on a peak in the High Tatras. Created from 1968 to 1974, the design was a utopian solution for the upcoming 1984 Winter Olympics, for which the High Tatras were originally supposed to apply. Conceived of as a huge ring with a diameter of 1.2 kilometres and a usable area of 4 million square metres, it was a purely conceptual exercise from the very start, but was nonetheless theoretically feasible in practice as well.