by Ray Bradbury
Part of the Electro-Computer Environment would be, of course, my Asking Room. You walk in and ask the room to take you anywhere and it does. “Africa! You Shout.” And Africa’s all around you, on four walls—or one great shell wall that encloses you, if you’re seated. The varieties of adventures a child—or an adult—could ask for might be endless. Each adventure lasting from ten to twenty minutes.
If the town ever got around to building an overhead people mover, or miniature monorail, the pods from this practical ride could, if one wished, detach themselves and Detour to Paris or Turn Here For Bombay. By pressing a switch while enroute across Peoria, the tired housewife could derail on a sidetrack that slid into an experience tunnel near the Arcade, there to see the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal or the Houses of Parliament before returning to the wonders of Kraft dinners and Coors beer.
All the above, of course, is expensive. Spend your money first on the Town Plaza and its environs, plus the Arcade. The People Mover Pod Experience can come as a dividend, later.
Where were we? Oh, yes…
Back to the four corners again. On the second and third floors of the four buildings on the four corners are the Gray Battalion Headquarters, the Old Folks homes, with the best damn views in town of the bike-riding, ice cream-eating, park-strolling, people-watching, book-reading public. Out of the two-fisted TV grip at last and back out on the street where the greatest danger is an elbow, and soap opera, the real stuff, boils in every passing bod.
Was it Aristotle who woke one morn in his sixties and discovered that for the first time in Lord knows how many years, he had no a.m. erection, and raced down the streets, shouting to the skies, “Free! Free at last! Free!”
Our People Machine, with all its components, promises just that. No more crowding in the TV room with all those strange people and their maniac grins and lousy lines and ill-mannered laughter. No more being forced to stay in school (Channel 2, that is, or Channel 4) when the great world of the town invites and truly beckons.
Free! Free at last! Free!
What have we been building here? Not just simple hungers and needs. Not just shopping for things. But shopping for sociability, shopping for people.
Consider this: people on a jet have only been on a trip. People on a train have been on a journey.
Jets bore.
Trains enchant.
Because of—texture.
Jets diminish and vanish people.
Trains summon them back in harvests on both sides of the track.
As with jets and trains, so it is with cities and towns.
If you send people only on trips around your town, don’t be surprised if they go off on journeys or hoped-for journeys to other cities as they used to be.
It follows that the more texture, the more surprise you can build into a small town, the better chance you have of keeping them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree.
We’ve pretty well built our plaza now. How about the Main Street leading to the plaza? Starting one or two blocks away, of course, is where you leave your damn car and hoof it, happily I might add, with or without family, toward the Hearthing Place, the Town Family Park we have been describing. Along the way, the more fast-food places you can add to it the better, so that people can carry their own hot dog or pizza onto a park bench. One of the shops, right at the plaza, might be a picnic-basket lunch emporium where for ten bucks or so you can get a wicker of chicken, corn, french fries, and for a few more bucks a bottle of wine, which you tote over to picnic tables in the plaza which, on its dullest night, is ten steps up from “Starsky and Hutch.” And where, for a dollar, you can step up and sledgehammer a TV set to death in the Play Pit.
What else do we need for people input? The best damn LP record shop in the world, open until two a.m. Popcorn machines everywhere. Candy-making devices in sweet shop windows. Plus the best magazine and newspaper racks this side of Peoria. Stationery shops with so many lovely papers in the window you can’t resist buying what you don’t need.
On the way into all this, some Burma Shave signposts, please:
1984 Will Not Arrive!
But 2001? Man Alive!
Do you see where I travel? Do you know where I want us all to arrive? There isn’t one new idea in all the above. Everything is ancient. But, idiots that we are, we have lost our plazas, destroyed our drug stores, dismantled our fountains, grassed over our sidewalks, and driven our ownselves back into our houses to serve prison sentences meted out by “Baretta,” “Quincy,” or the “Dallas” idiots.
At Disney World, thousands of people just sit and watch, every night. Trouble is, you have to pay to get in, and at midnight or so they shut it up and kick you out.
Look at your average architectural rendering or building layout viewed in magazines during the past 40 years. Where in hell are the people? Those little ants running around on the super-clean sidewalks—are those people? What are they doing? Nothing. Just standing there.
What we do here is put people back into proper scale. Our renderings will show people doing things. Like talking, eating, walking, sitting, playing music, playing games, riding, picking each other up, taking each other home. Their acts, their needs will be visible supports on which to lean a town or draw a facade. They won’t exist for the town, the town will exist for them, which is only proper and right.
It follows that any architect/city planner, future builder, mayor-dreamer, chamber of commerce patriot who welds this People Machine together, will have what happen to him?
One late day in 1988 or so, this builder-planner-dreamer will be seen racing down Main Street pursued by ten thousand wild citizens. Freed from their TV bastille, these maniacs of joy, will catch the builder-dreamer of the People Machine, and will run him for president or (why not?) emperor of the universe!
And when the town center is rebuilt let the refugee airlift begin. From the Piranesi Prison cities mired in 1984, let those who will move back and ahead at the same time. Toward a 1999 that buds and a 2000 that blossoms. Bringing with them, of course, your small or large corporation for employment and sustenance.
A large order. But then the death of towns, the stagnation of cities, and the dooming of millions is no small matter.
But what about those left behind in the big tubercular cities?
The People Machine will fit there, too. Portions of every metropolis are towns to themselves. There’s nothing wrong with Greenwich Village that adding in some of the elements mentioned here wouldn’t cure. In other parts of New York City, clean out a whole city block and load in all of my components. Plaza, bookshop, ice cream parlor, penny arcade, and all.
So, by this century’s end, we can not only revive the small town, but cure the big one, with the same tonics.
And, while we’re at it, try to give back to the cities some of the other elements they have lost, without realizing it, over the years.
We want to stay young forever, isn’t that true?
We want every day to be that day when we were young and we leaped from bed and asked the world what it had to say or show or be that was brand-spanking fresh-born.
We go to world’s fairs for that.
We travel to faraway places for that.
But if all you find when you turn a corner is one more flat surface of marble, one more bank, one more glassless frontage, one more uninhabited edifice, one more unlit shop, the desire to wander, to wonder, extinguishes itself. Torchless candles, we turn and go to other places, other cities that promise delightful twists and turns amongst shops that stay open late or at least stay lit late, so we can eye-browse the trinket windows.
Think how nice it might be if the largest building in any small American town could have one flat surface, windowless, on which one night the Eiffel Tower would, projected, build itself during the evening, with immense flood-tossed images of the Tower one-fourth erected, one-half, three-fourths, and then, at last, erupted tall against the Parisian sky.
At midnight, tear it down.
> That is, pull the image from your great laser-beam projector.
Next night, build the Empire State Building there.
Or toss up column upon Bernini column, the facade of the holy Vatican and St. Peter’s.
Or sandwich the White House on top of Monticello on top of Mount Vernon with a lower layer of New Orleans.
This way. Delight.
Wouldn’t you, on occasion, want to go downtown some nights, to see just what in hell had been built or torn down? One more reason to visit the old boring Main Street, on its way back through technological rejuvenation.
All of this applies to both small towns and small parts of large cities. We need at least one building in every town, or in some part of a city, that gives us a sense of identity.
Think how it would be if there were one tower in each town that told us not only what we are—the town—but what we can be—the Universe.
If one of these towers were built in a town, as a prototype, others might follow.
Describe the tower?
Here it is.
It would be a tower with a circular escalator moving very slowly up through time, through images, through sounds, through projections, through three-dimensional objects, bas-reliefs.
And most of its images would be of flight: pterodactyls kiting primeval horizons, birds in migration, or sun symbols forever rising in ancient skies to bring with them the sun kings of time. During the ascension, Marco Polo’s imported Chinese fireworks would light the way, lifting architectural beauties up into the explosive light. Migrations of men would follow, climbing the spiral, multicolored with multitudinous dreams. The dreams being newborn kites and balloons, and gliders and skyscrapers imitating flight in stone. And toward the end of our tower museum ascension, the Wright brothers’ winged bike sifting up from the Kitty Hawk dunes, and all the jets and dirigibles to follow. All of it spiraled to music and the vast firebreath of the Apollo rockets lifting us toward the sun from which we all came. At the top of our climb, the planets, the far suns and our possible future. At the end of our hundred-foot climb, we would step forth in a miniature planetarium to scan a universe that can be ours if we reach out a hand willed by a reaching mind. From there, we would watch future rockets moving off on the last migration toward an inevitable existence through all the eons to come.
Let us call it the Hearthing Place. It could be built as an adjunct to the old city hall or as a tower next to a church. Or, excuse our fiery dust, an insurance tower, why not, that insured the future? What better insurance is there than the rocket? What insuring? The health of man. His will. Founded on what? The imagination of man. His dreams. With what in escrow, with what as down payment? The whole history of his planning and thinking and dreaming and making with his hands and night visions and noon accomplishments.
Think how it might be for coming generations to go to bed and, falling into slumber, hear the great tower proclaim futures, even as the old bell tower in the Civil War town hall proclaimed the present with a feel of the Gothic and somehow graveyard past. The tolling of the funeral bell of lost or won wars then. The sound of the rockets moving up in our tower now and forever. A counting up instead of a counting down. A soft voice, not a loud one, whispering the hour that promises tomorrow and survival. And at midnight, if you’re awake, looking out, the dome of the tower, in sudden full firefalls of arrival, as Man reaches and enters the threshold of the universe. All the stars in fireworks there, pulsing, for a brief interval as night turns on its mighty cosmic heel and motions toward a promise of dawn.
What a tower. What a promise. What an insured future.
Architecture that imagines more than itself—that imagines man in order to have even more imagined.
The stuff of tomorrows has always been boys, girls, men, women, projecting images of their days on the ceilings of their bedrooms in the hour before sleep.
Those images we must pluck down and erector-set in our cities. Let the tower be the rocket. Let the rocket show us not north, nor east, nor west, nor south by southwest but—up. Let all the old gods from Olympus visit there to be visited. If you want to ride up and speak with them, late at night, let them be there, in soft converse, for children to question, and in an alcove half up through Time, on the way to Cosmos, let it be possible to step off the escalator and stand watching and hearing Apollo and Aphrodite and Hermes and all the rest telling our visions and pointing in yet further directions.
Architectures that imagine, architectures that promise, architectures that more than stand, architectures that dream. Architectures that tell us what we can be, what our destiny is. The old structures only promised impossible heavens in death. Let the new ones promise possible life for all the generations to come, when we have knocked death ten times over and turned time inside out, and made it beyond the Moon, beyond Mars, to hearthing places and seedbeds we cannot now imagine, far out beyond the reach of that Gothic death that sounds with every marrow-chilling tone of that old city tower.
Buildings with fire in them, with energy, with blood, and all those dear night-thrown visions on dusky ceilings and two-in-the-morning (oh God, I hope I can—!) walls.
Building surprise back into a large city is a matter of erasing blank facades, inserting the small shop back where it once was, on streets that do not refuse us or turn us off, but promise us renewal. Small towns, because of their size, are harder problems. Surprise must come from what little we can do with a minimal amount of architecture and a maximum number of people flowing in surprises around and amongst each other. Big cities depend on mixtures of buildings and humans, small towns must survive mainly with person colliding with person in the most amiable of collisions.
So there you have it. The beginning, most certainly not the middle or the end, of my thinking beyond 1984. That 1984 I hate because it is an intellectual fraud and never had a chance of arriving in a jump-shout-yell culture of ideas such as our own. And on toward the 2001 I truly and completely and resolutely believe in, because it is the chance for us to remake ourselves that is irresistible.
We will do everything, we will solve everything, we will build everything that needs doing, solving, and building during the next few years.
How come? Why the positive bias? Why the inclination toward optimism? Because optimism has only meant one thing to me—the chance to behave optimally. Hip-deep, that is, in our genetics, we behave up to the limit of our blood and brains.
We have done it before. We have done it often.
This is a new war. The best. The war to save our skins, our social selves, the fun of living, to build instead of destroy, to survive rather than be bored to death. To be once more the children of a wide-ranging, imaginative and vital culture, rather than the slaves of network television.
What greater challenge is there?
Forward!
1982
RAY BRADBURY
CREATOR OF
FANTOCCINI LTD.
Presents a concept
for an entertainment park encounter.
Exhausting to write, exhausting to read!
THE GREAT ELECTRIC TIME MAZE
Incorporating
THE YESTERMORROW TIME EXPERIENCE
THE TIME STREAM RESTAURANT COMPLEX
THE ANYTIME, ANYWHERE STOP AND SHOP AT YOUR LEISURE SPACE
Eat! Live! Shop!
Past! Present! Future!
Explore the Pyramid!
Hunt the Dinosaur!
Fall out beyond Andromeda!
Run from the dark AC-DC Hound!
Get lost and split in a Thermonuclear Lab!
ALL IN ONE PLACE
TIME MAZE ONE
Restoring Energy
Which is what
Ristorantes/Restaurants
are all about…
revving up with food ahead of
time in order to be ready for
The Experiences!
You can’t get there from here.
…or…
If you’re not careful
, Arriving’s a bore.
Being on a Journey is the Way and the Life, and being Lost is Best of All!
So the first thing we are, when we enter the First Maze is:
Lost.
Beautifully lost, that is, in something like the alleys of Paris, the vast spiderweb risings and fallings of ways and byways in the Casbah…
A touch of London waterfront, with fog here…
A remembrance of Shanghai or Hong Kong there…
The Tivoli just beyond…
And beyond that, a twist to find Dublin, a turn to discover Venice, a roundabout to Rome, upstairs to Vienna, downstairs to Flamenco Madrid caverns…
What we have here, of course, is a multiplicity, a plethora, a maze of restaurants, large and small, foreign and domestic, where the hot dog blends with the pizza, which blends with the falafel, which wanders over into the strudel and the cream bun, the coffee and aperitif outdoor cafe. All the textures, colors, smells we can borrow from every street, cornucopia alleyway, every burrow and lost corner of Piccadilly or Montmartre, Florence or downtown Barcelona, let us borrow, let us build, let us light. The overall flavor in the air might well be the smell of coffee being roasted somewhere in the deeps of New Orleans—but the scent reaches us here. Our noses should lead us even before our eyes see the Maze and can hardly wait to be lost.
Because the maze of restaurants, twining in and out of history, should circle and re-circle itself so that it might take three or four visits before you figure out where everything is. In the meantime you are delightfully blundering into sitdown cafes, stand-up hot dog stands, lounge-around beer halls, take-your-time-forever French restaurants, instant-ice billets. The overall smell may be coffee, but the overall sound is tasting, chewing, swallowing. It is a Sea of Eats.
