Abstract
This paper reflects on the search for a lost, obscure piece of experimental architecture that appeared on the west coast of Scotland in the late 1960s. Encouraged by cultural geography’s efforts to recuperate storytelling as a valid mode of inquiry and to adopt a more enchanted, affirmative disposition to our endeavors, we develop a geographical story intended to draw out how enchanted experiences gained through curiosity and an openness to contingencies can serve as a vital force for sustaining geographical ways of being, doing and knowing with the world. This account focuses on our encounters with various research sites that we identify as ‘dreamlands’ to express the idiosyncratic, unregulated, unexpected sensations of wonder and delight that such places evoked, the excessive materialities they revealed and the imaginative processes they elicited. We argue that such dreamlands are not as superfluous as might be assumed by their uncanny absence from the polished end-products of scholarship, and instead, allude to the latent forces of enchantment to which geographers might become better attuned when conducting and crafting their research.
Highlights
This paper reflects on the search for a lost, obscure piece of experimental architecture that appeared on the west coast of Scotland in the late 1960s
Driven by curiosity to follow the storylines that extended from our patchy archival findings into these disparate field sites, we confronted a superfluity of material objects and entangled narratives, a seething proliferation that we initially felt unable to incorporate into an academic paper tailored to developing distinctive theoretical contributions
We tell this research story, reflecting on its emergence from our initial meeting with the Albarns, and tracing how our search for a lost architectural object evolved into a sensational adventure in the lived practices of cultural geography, an odyssey composed of extraordinary, serendipitous and enchanted encounters and unexpected excess.[4]
Summary
Following our chance encounter in New Orleans, we first aimed to track down the architect of the Fifth Dimension. Having received several wonderful responses to our newspaper appeal, our initial task in Girvan was to search for any archival clues in the usual places; visiting the local library and chatting with the slightly perplexed staff, and on to Ayr’s Carnegie Library where, after several hours trawling through microfiche records, we assembled a smattering of news pieces about the Fifth Dimension. Word soon got around that two strangers were in town asking questions about the Fifth Dimension, and over cups of tea and biscuits in the McKechnie Institute, several long-term residents arrived to share their teenage stories Their patchy tales told of first witnessing the extraordinary structure, entering it and experiencing its sensory overload, their excitedness at having a cutting-edge example of avant-garde 1960s creativity in their somewhat staid town, and the contrastingly scathing responses of the town’s elders to the attraction. She insisted, ‘long gone’, buried deep and irretrievable in anything like its original form
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