Heliopolis

The model is a design for the Olympic city of Heliopolis situated on the peaks of the High Tatra Mountains. The design dates from the turn of the 1960s and 1970s and its author is the Slovak group VAL – the conceptual artist Alex Mlynárčik and architects Ľudovít Kupkovič and Viera Mecková. Heliopolis belongs to the sphere of the world architecture of the future. The visionary project of the city in the shape of an enormous bird’s nest, with the diameter of more than one kilometer, deals with the problem of finding suitable space for the increasing demands of sports and tourism, while maintaining the maximum protection of the nature in the Tatras. The design shows the central circle of the city of sixty stories, with the infrastructure, the residential and social functions, enclosed in it. Around the main circle of Heliopolis, several zones in the High Tatras were designed – the zone of Olympic sports and games, the zone of sports, games and recreation, the zone of hiking and mountain climbing, and the zone of silence. In the last resort the Heliopolis project is no utopia, rather it is a search for a balance between nature and the requirements of civilization.