A fascination with obsolescence as an inherent landscape condition lies at the core of a project that thematically focuses on fundamental scientific inquiry in reference to the Big Science. It stems from the preconceived tensions between the notions of progress versus obsolescence and progress versus accident.

The former is a result of the latent dependency of economic progress on the perpetual obsolescence of space, as is argued in the theory paper entitled Territories in Obsolescence. And the latter is a controversion that scientific progress and technocentric accident are two sides of the same coin, as the philosopher Paul Virilio argued in his University of Disaster. The theory provides a critical understanding of the scientific experiment and introduces the counter notions of accident and disaster.

The project is centred on the need to contain scientific progress architecturally inside micro-regions of concentrated knowledge production and satisfy the territorial concerns of the Big Science that—more often than not—take on an infrastructural scale. It addresses these themes in Trieste—a territory of contested history and sovereignty once envisioned as the city of science and knowledge.

The project concerns the conception and the design of Anatoli Bugorski Independent Research Institute for Scientific Failures which inhabits a post-industrial landscape of the former cement quarries that allow for sustaining such an institution. That is both materially and conceptually by providing the underground territory for experimentation and the primary structural material. The project speculates reversing re-naturalisation processes and excavating the underground spaces by employing the room and pillar dogmatic mining method superimposed upon the critically unstable conditions of the Karstic terrain. Here, the notions of accident and disaster materialise within the post-industrial landscape.

Radical experimentation, formal plurality, and oscillation between architecture and visual arts permeated the 50s and 60s generation of architects and artists on both sides of the politically divided Europe. Central and Eastern European examples from this period are often undervalued, if addressed at all, both by Western European standards and even their local contexts. VAL—Voies et Aspects du Lendemain—collective was formed in 1968 Czechoslovakia by the conceptual artist Alex Mlynárčik and the architects Viera Mecková and Ľudovít Kupkovič. VAL developed eight distinct utopias and megastructures in parallel to the global trends and Michel Ragon’s techno-centric theory of prospective architecture. As the height of VAL’s activity coincides with the peak of the normalisation period in the 70s Czechoslovakia, their utopian projects remain resistant to clear-cut interpretation then and now. Heliopolis, Akusticon, and the People’s Assembly of Argillia are three distinct projects of VAL explored in reference to the themes of monumentality and architecture-sculpture, prospective architecture, and performance art influenced by Nouveau Réalisme. Despite the unobstructed idealism that VAL emanates, it is argued that VAL’s proposals go beyond an uncritical techno-positive utopia and can hardly be distilled from the irony and socio-cultural critique. And it is in the act of designing the libertarian utopias that VAL members found a form of individual escapism as means to express themselves creatively and to manageably live in a totalitarian regime—utopia as escapism. By subverting the expectations of what are the forms of expressing architectural dissent, escapism is understood as an act of resistance. Resistance to socio-cultural regression, economic depression, professional frustrations, and personal disillusionment with the failed Communist utopia—escapism as protest. The thesis questions our contemporary standing towards Central and Eastern European architects and artists whose work—as illustrated by VAL—entails complexities and contradictions of its socio-cultural and political context.