Portmeirion as Virtual Reality

A Surreal Mindscape

A charming place, but unreal, like a picture postcard brought to life.
—Cecily Mackworth, Ends of the World (1987)

The village as seen from the centenary Gazebo

Virtual reality for the masses?  It’s already here, and you don’t need a high-tech headset, goggles, or gloves.  It’s at Portmeirion, where reality and illusion are indistinguishable.  But don’t be fooled by glossy brochures: Portmeirion is no candy-colored utopian community.  It’s more like an elaborate contraption from a bizarre science fiction novel, manipulating its visitors in undreamt-of ways.  As with a video game, if you have a grasp of how things operate, you can play along and increase your level of fun.

Portmeirion opened to the public in 1926 (nearly 30 years before Disneyland) and was experimenting with virtual reality decades before the term was coined.  Columnist Nicholas De Jongh writes that “to see the place is like traveling into someone else’s vision.”¹  Portmeirion was “built by someone who never left childhood completely.  It’s a world which the subconscious would know and recognize as invented rather than seen.”

The mother of all themed environments sends you tumbling mind, body, and spirit into the heart of invention.  Consider:

A town hall serving no citizenry.
• You find yourself standing in front of a town hall, yet this is a village with no residents, only guests.
• Phony picture windows are meant to be looked at, not looked through.
• The town square is surrounded by bright, Italianate pavilions, seemingly having gotten “lost in a storm and accidentally land[ing] on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean as opposed to their familiar Mediterranean Sea.”²
• The buildings’ vibrant colors (white, green turquoise, ochre, terracotta, yellow, orange, cobalt blue, and pink) are “thoroughly disorienting.”³
• “Space ebbs and flows like water into small pools and dramatic, open cascades.”⁴  Individual buildings are in fact jumbles of salvaged materials from all over Europe.

Various time streams converge at the Hercules pedestal.  Plaques celebrate several different years.
• With the warping of space, time itself is twisted: buildings from different historical periods stand side by side, while plaques on statues memorialize not single years but multiple centuries at once.
• “On a clear day . . . one is captured in a 360 degree sensurround screen of architectural fantasy, sea, sunshine, sand and, occasionally, snow on the surrounding peaks.”⁵
• It’s a port, yet the estuary is so shallow that only the occasional dinghy can approach.
• There’s a lighthouse on a rocky promontory, but no light.

The Amis Reunis is a boat-shaped retaining wall below the main hotel building.
• There’s a boat on the harbor, but it’s permanently anchored because it is in fact a building made of stone (complete with slate floor), serving as a retaining wall.

People can’t even agree on how “substantial” the village is.  Travel critic Jan Morris calls it “a floating fantasy above the sea . . . the whole thing . . . clustered with an airy flimsiness on its steep slope, as though one day it might slide all on top of itself into the water.”⁶  In direct contradiction, Country Life says that “At Portmeirion the buildings almost literally grew out of the rock and were intended to look as if they did.”⁷

A “forced perspective” architectural technique makes buildings such as the Campanile and Bridge House seem taller.

Ramshackle or sturdy?  Exotic or traditional?  Practical or whimsical?  Cluttered or immaculate?  The virtual reality of Portmeirion defies easy categorization.  In this topsy-turvy world, petrol pumps are ornaments, gilded Burmese dancers stand atop Ionic columns, and a giant Buddha sits under a pantiled loggia.  “Portmeirion is in turns foreign and then strangely familiar, beautiful but not in an ordinary kind of way.”⁸  Around every corner, Clough’s magic wand manipulates our perceptions to create a wholly artificial reality.  The remarkable thing is that most of the tricks are subliminal.  Architectural sleights such as forced perspective and gradiented paint make buildings seem taller—or smaller—than they really are.  For instance, the height of the Campanile has been so exaggerated that the top is actually only one-half size.  The walls of the Gate House cottage feature three different shades of paint, lightest at the top and darkest below.  Oversized chimneys, extremely low arches, reduced upper stories, and small statues also create illusions of height and distance.⁹  Such manipulation makes a building more welcoming and accessible.  According to Clough, “Portmeirion is . . . very definitely scaled down, and if not strictly ‘miniature’ is none the less rather cozily compact and intimate.”

Views are deliberately framed by archways.

Who could keep track of Portmeirion’s total control of your environment?  In designing his village, Clough avoided symmetry in order to achieve movement, deliberately accenting a sudden elevation in landscape, for example, so that your eye is forced to keep moving up.  Everywhere you look, views are deliberately framed by archways, doorways, and sculpted vegetation.

However, lest visitors wander about like puppets, expectations are dashed at every opportunity—buildings with towers or battlements aren’t fortresses, for example, nor do pinnacles or flying buttresses signify a church.  Stately columns may not support much of anything, and ornate doorways likely lead to nowhere.  The entire village is “rich in the unexpected: odd angles, surprising little balconies, curious juxtapositions.”¹⁰  The grand design is meant to be a feast for the mind as well as the eyes.  The visitor is meant to think outside the box, to get lost in another dimension, to stumble upon spontaneous drama, to fire forgotten synapses hidden in the recesses of the brain, to discover the missing pieces of a seemingly finished puzzle.

This mermaid statue is actually a painting on sheet metal—an illusion which invites close inspection.

Interestingly, the follies of Portmeirion are boldly presented, without apology.  The trompe l’oeils at every turn are effective, but don’t fool so much as intrigue.  Clough not only produces illusion but—in confessing it—stimulates the desire for it.  A real threshold can be found in any building, and as a rule it will lead to somewhere unextraordinary, but Portmeirion tells us that folly thresholds correspond “much more to our daydream demands.”¹¹

Portmeirion tends to strike visitors as otherworldly, like “the site of a fabled Brigadoon.”¹²  But what, exactly, do we associate with the fanciful?  The terraced gardens and cobbled squares are all imbued with idealism and desire.  The buildings are picturesque through the sentiment they inspire.  We unconsciously associate the campanile, for example, with romance and mystery.  The virtual reality tugs at the strings of our emotions.

A Dream World Built of Stone

The extraordinary village of Portmeirion . . . looks as if it was conceived in a colourful dream.
—Rebecca Ford, Footprint Wales (2005)

Years before the construction of Portmeirion, historian of technology Lewis Mumford foresaw how a dreamer architect could build a fantasy realm out of worldly materials.  Later, Mumford so admired Portmeirion that he practically made it his second home.  The following brief sketch of his book The Study of Utopias (1922) should help to demonstrate why he found the village so captivating, as well as to illuminate the programming behind Clough’s virtual reality.

Mumford begins by suggesting that what makes human history interesting is that we live in two worlds: the one within and the one without.  The world within includes all the fantasies and projections that pattern people’s behavior.  Mumford observes that the physical world is inescapable, but the world of ideas exists on another plane.  It is our substitute for the external world—a kind of home to which we flee when reality becomes too much.

At the same time, the world within serves to sort and sift our everyday concerns, “and a new sort of reality is projected back again upon the external world,” Mumford says.  This serves one of two functions: as a means for escape or compensation that releases us from our daily frustrations, or as a means for providing “a condition for our release in the future.”  The second function seeks to change the external world so that one can deal with it on one’s own terms.  Mumford explains that in the first function, “we build impossible castles in the air,” while in the other we hire an architect and a mason and begin to build an environment which meets our essential needs.

Utopias of escape are good only for short visits, however, because they are imaginary.  Perfection would be unstimulating and paralyzing.  But “Utopias of reconstruction” seek to alter the physical world and the mental framework of the people who live there.  Mumford notes that we can’t dismiss our ideals from the facts of our lives.  “[T]he things we dream of tend consciously or unconsciously to work themselves out in the pattern of our daily lives,” he writes.  “We need not abandon the real world in order to enter these realizable worlds; for it is out of the first that the second are always coming.”

So Mumford must have found in Portmeirion’s reconstructed buildings a testimonial to his belief that humankind can realize its Utopian dreams in the physical world.  Indeed, Clough stated frequently that his ideal was to develop a beautiful location without spoiling it, and even to enhance its natural beauties.  His finished product proved to be more than a mere fanciful extravagance (as his critics would have it).  Portmeirion remains today a good commercial business.  For all its visitors, the village is a “no-place” where we can actually spend the night and forget the ugly problems of the “real world” outside.  And this virtual reality might even inspire us to dream up some of our own plans.

next chapter » “Locating Temporal Vortices”