ASSEMBLING A DREAM WORLD
Five settlements in the same region:
One:
Two:
Three:
Four:
Five:
Some people have imaginations, and some people don’t. Those who created these four settlements are said to be in the former category, but the truth is the antecedents are easy to identify.
Middle Earth’s prototypes can be found in England, Ireland, China, the Iowa prairie, Spain, Italy, the Merritt Parkway, Tibet, Barcelona, Viking Scandinavia, the Adirondacks, the Col de Tende, Mont Saint Michel, Urbino, Lincoln, Petra, Assisi, Durham, St. Paul-de-Vence, Stonehenge, Crete, Cordoba, Baalbek, Marakkech, Lalibela, Rhodes, Granada…as well as places unbuilt but real enough in children’s books and the minds of Maxfield Parrish, N.C. Wyeth, Beatrix Potter, Walt Disney, Jan van Eyck, JMW Turner, Arnold Boecklin, Alma-Tadema, Gustave Moreau, Altdorfer, M.C. Escher, Hugh Ferris and Fritz Lang (even animal architects such as paper wasps and prairie dogs have contributed to the eclectic salmagundi)… wherever places that appeal to the human sensibility have been built or assembled.
Eclectic, knowledgeable, wonderful, maybe even imaginative…you bet. But original? Maybe not. Does anybody really care; isn’t wonderful enough? Can you identify the precedents plundered by the pasticheurs? If you can, it’s just a parlor trick—just stuff for the effete intellectual snobs to snicker about.
Would Peter Jackson’s purposes have been better served if he had hired a crew of set designers hell-bent on originality? Should we denounce them, enraged, for their immoral borrowings, their unscrupulous pandering to the middle class’s kitschy sensibility? No, I hear you say, after all this is a movie. But wait, it’s OK; this is a movie.
But in the real world…
What? In the real world we must have originality? Or do we really mean conformity to a rigid paradigm, a spectrum of possibilities that extends from Adolf Loos to Frank Gehry? Truth is, even the cult of originality is a form of fakery; we have to rely on our audience to be insufficiently versed in architectural history to recognize the precedents. For this reason there were architecture schools that stopped teaching architectural history for fear it would compromise the students’ illusion of originality.
Modernism is predicated on ignorance of the past. The avant-garde mistakes individualism (which is common) for creativity (which is rare).
I think many of us would be quite happy if our surroundings resembled any of these places that Jackson and Tolkien have cooked up. These are all walkable, and consequently the surrounding countryside remains unspoiled. It would take an effete intellectual snob to object to their kitchiness in Maryland and approve their creativity in Lord of the Rings. And yet consider for a moment: who wouldn’t be delighted to live in the pastoral surroundings of the Shire?
There you are, prosperously ensconced in your earth-form dwelling, troglodytically light in your ecological footprint. You can dispense with air conditioning and know that you are advancing the Green cause and doing what you can to slow global warming.
I am sent a monthly screed called Eco-Structure promoting this very kind of thing, but the buildings illustrated inside are hybrids of Lever House with grass on the roof, not these warm and fuzzy testaments to mankind’s kinship with chipmunks.
No…the style is wrong! To the prim and upright Ichabods who set themselves up as the arbiters of architectural morality, these burrows are simply too reminiscent of other places, other times; too comforting, too familiar, too…cute (the English word is twee).
At the risk of throwing the scolds into a tizzy, I propose this subversive thesis: any one of these places in Lord of the Rings could be built today—unmodified--anywhere in the 48 states, and they would find buyers. Not just buyers but happy buyers. In the real world.
The retired Oregon hippie day trader would choose the earth shelters of The Shire. Here, among the tree roots, he would merrily install his graying wife, his pot seedlings and his collection of Neil Young albums.
Rohan is obviously a ski resort, seen here in the off-season:
I would be quite happy in Gondor, together with my fellow weirdos:
Rivendel has a limited clientele who stay for only a few weeks at a time. They are all interested in est, scientology or rolfing. Some come to fish.
Gray Haven is a gated community. Its plutocrats arrive by cabin cruiser:
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Oh, today’s built environment is so joyless. People seek to escape to their tepid and ultimately style-less McMansions, but there they find no respite from the banal; those places quite simply are not fanciful enough to lose yourself.
If people were offered alternatives, don’t you think some would choose them?
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Quote
Originally posted by jordanb
