OOT - Out of Town

OOT (Out-of-Town) is dedicated to investigating the relationships between resource consumption, the built environment, and the socio-ecological imbalances these processes reproduce, particularly between urban and rural territories. If more just and sustainable, non-extractive material regimes are to emerge, spatial research must be capable of questioning the epistemological traditions within which it has developed. These traditions have often been marked by a form of “resource amnesia” (Avermaete, 2025) and a profound lack of awareness regarding both the material resources that sustain our world and the very categories through which resources are defined and understood (Bridge, 2009).

This year’s title is borrowed from Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth: before descending into the depths of the earth, Axel must first take “lessons in giddiness”, learning to confront and overcome vertigo. The expression might be borrowed from John Playfair, a Scottish scientist who, in the biographical account of the father of modern geology, James Hutton, wrote an eloquent, oft-quoted description of a boat trip to Siccar Point in 1788: “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”

Here the vertigo refers, beyond the physical sensation, to the experience of being confronted with depths, scales, and temporalities that exceed ordinary perception. Actually, the exploration of hidden worlds, whether through Jules Verne’s fictional journeys beneath the Earth's surface or the scientific investigation of the oceanic abyss, reminds us that the limits of knowledge are often products of the limits of perception. These uncommon environments act as mirrors of our own epistemological boundaries, while each expedition into the unknown reveals previously unseen species, ecosystems, and forms of interaction.

In a similar vein, this year (in collaboration with UHasselt) we propose to use the Einstein Telescope, and the prospect of its construction in the Three-Country Region spanning Liège, Maastricht, and Aachen, as a point of entry into an exploration of what remains largely invisible within contemporary spatial practice: the depths of our Earth and their unexpected articulations on the surface we inhabit or the air that we breath. Rather than treating the telescope solely as a scientific megaproject, we approach it as an opportunity to uncover ecological, geological, and territorial relations that have become increasingly obscure precisely because they have grown more invisible: gravitational fields, digital infrastructures, energy flows, climate models, logistical networks, regulations, and geological memories. How can architecture engage with all that? By activating modes of attention that multiply instead of reducing this world, taking into account in order to make count, we hope to become capable of imagining alternative spatial futures, different ways of building and inhabiting.

(*) The Einstein Telescope is a proposed European research infrastructure designed to detect gravitational waves. The project envisions a triangular underground observatory with three 10-kilometre-long arms located approximately 300 metres below ground.