A fascinating memoir of the architect best known as the creator of Portmeirion, artist's retreat, tourist attraction, and setting of the television classic, "The Prisoner" A feature of the now cult television series, "The Prisoner", which helped it to create such an hypnotic effect on its many fans, was the mysterious setting. All the shows were shot on location in an ornate, self-contained Italianate village ringed by mountains, forests, and the sea -- Portmeirion. Few realized the setting was real, not a production set, ...
Read More
A fascinating memoir of the architect best known as the creator of Portmeirion, artist's retreat, tourist attraction, and setting of the television classic, "The Prisoner" A feature of the now cult television series, "The Prisoner", which helped it to create such an hypnotic effect on its many fans, was the mysterious setting. All the shows were shot on location in an ornate, self-contained Italianate village ringed by mountains, forests, and the sea -- Portmeirion. Few realized the setting was real, not a production set, but a "working" village of architectural curiosities created on the coast of Wales by the eccentric Clough Williams-Ellis (1883-1978). Earlier in the century it was known as the "Xanadu of Wales", and was frequented by the likes of Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Noel Coward (who wrote Blithe Spirit there), and Richard Hughes. Portmeirion, with its vivid colors, various styles, and exotica, was the summing up of William-Ellis architectural ideas, functional yet full of jokes. As Jonah Jones describes in the first book on his subject, William-Ellis was an outstanding architect and planner, in love with Palladian forms yet talented in the vernacular and the Modern. His architectural projects, many of which are described in this book, sum up his ambivalent character as a classicist and a maverick. Jone's biography charts an unconventional life: an English boarding school childhood, a long marriage to Annabel Strachey (cousin of the great English writer), action in World War I, and a lifelong career in architecture which included the renovation of English country houses, new town planning, remote planning in Soviet Russia and China, the foundation of nationalparks in Britain and, of course, the building of Portmeirion. Unconventional to the end, his ashes were scattered by marine rocket over a Welsh estuary near his home.
Read Less
