“I wanted to show that you could develop even a very beautiful place without defiling it,” said Sir Clough Williams-Ellis. “In fact, that if you did it with sufficient loving care, you might even enhance what God had given you.”
It was 1969, and Williams-Ellis was talking about Portmeirion, his Italianate, proto-post-modernist “village” on the coast of north Wales. He began work in the mid-1920s, opening a hotel in 1926 to help fund the rest of the project, which continued into the 1970s. (It was the set for the 1960s TV series The Prisoner, and stole the show.)
