大象传媒

A video clip from the 大象传媒 Wales programme 'A Love Affair with Life' about Sir Clough Williams-Ellis and Portmeirion, presented by Wyn Thoams, 1969.

Voiceover - Wyn Thomas

"In this profusion of architecture, how does he achieve fitness and propriety? By what visual devices does he discipline such a crowded canvas?"

Voiceover - Sir Clough Williams-Ellis

"Well, I think any view is always enhanced by a partially enclosing frame or foreground, just as a picture is. I've done it really all over the place, because the number of buildings with their fairly formal fenestration - the windows arranged to a pattern, fairly normally. And then, I put a little window purely for that purpose. In fact, some of them have got lenses in, so that you get a condensed view, because it would let in a shaft of sunlight, or you can look up at a particular skyline, or anything else. People talk about picture windows, now these are what you might call miniature picture windows, just little portholes."

Voiceover - Wyn Thomas

"Everywhere in this 'peep-show' world of his creation, the eye is trapped by the cunning snares of an architectural show man. He selects the view, he sets the scene, and then he frames it in a proscenium of his own making."

Voiceover - Sir Clough Williams-Ellis

"All my life, I've found that it is exciting and agreeable, these brief tunnels of relative darkness, leading into apparently enhanced brightness beyond. And a comfortable feeling of enclosure while passing through."

Voiceover - Wyn Thomas

"Here, Clough Williams-Ellis says he's practised what, as an architect, he's preached all through a long life. His buildings can be gay, and colourful and even exciting, and yet still be functional."