Imaginary Architecture for Imaginary Cities

The city of Cahokia, as it exists in Cahokia Jazz, has an ancient core. At the heart of the city are the Mound and the Plaza, laid out as they really are in the real-world archaeological site of Cahokia beside the Mississippi. But in the world of the book, where the city lived on, growing and changing over the centuries, there are other layers. Around the ancient core, there's the Jesuit-inspired settlement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, modelled on the real Jesuit cities of the Guaraní down in Paraguay. Cahokia too has its baroque cathedral, its stone arcades, its palace, its narrow alleys of brick baked the colour of cinnamon. But Cahokia Jazz takes place in the 1920s, so around that again, there's the modern city – modern, as modern was understood in 1922. I love early twentieth century American cities. They're shaped by technology, but not yet by the technology of the car. Mass mobility is provided by express trains, streetcars, electric interurbans that run tens or hundreds of miles out into the country. Steel-frame construction allows buildings to be taller, streets to be deeper and more shaded, the whole cityscape to be more sublime, than anywhere else in the world. And modernist style is coming in, but decoration has not yet gone out. The buildings are covered with a riot of Beaux-Arts statuary, Art Nouveau vegetation, Deco friezes and tilework. The city is still enchanted: a densely-inhabited place of terrors and wonders, luxury and poverty, display and secrets.

Writing Cahokia, I really understood Dorothy Sayers' remark about cheering herself up whenever she felt poor by giving Lord Peter Wimsey another medieval manuscript or Aubusson rug. Whenever I felt like it, I could add another apartment building, railroad station with a stained-glass dome, dim golden shrine. Most of all, I could indulge myself by commissioning many, many buildings for Cahokia from Frank Lloyd Wright. It's a Midwestern city, after all. Of course Wright, based just up the railroad line in Chicago, would work there. Of course he'd appeal to people looking for ways to be both modern and indigenous at the same time. The North Side of the city would be full of the low, longitudinal villas of his Prairie Period. The auditorium of Blessed Thomas Neta High School would look very like an enlarged version of the (real) Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois.

And – piéce de resistance time – I could do something about my frustration that his magnificent Imperial Hotel in Tokyo had been demolished by vandals in the 1970s, thus ensuring that I couldn't even fantasise about going to stay in it. In Cahokia, shortly before receiving the commission for the Imperial, Wright has built the Algonkian Hotel to a similar plan. (It's called the Algonkian because it's owned and operated by the Algonkian Tribal Endowment. It contains no Round Table; Dorothy Parker does not drink there.)

This is the main entrance of the Imperial Hotel:



Cahokia's Algonkian has a more elevated green roof, as a visual tribute to the Mound, but the decorated concrete pylons are the same, the roofed carriageway is the same. And the Algonkian has the great advantage that you can, at least in the book, walk inside:

'The interior spaces formed a kind of never-concluding cave, a geometric box unfolding further and further, the square pillars and square hanging balconies all pierced and gapped to reveal more doors, stairs, openings beyond, lit not from overhead by a hundred separate glows from a hundred separate lanterns, each illuminating a differently rich surface. Concrete cast into intricate hollow blocks, bricks with the courses of mortar between picked out in gold, copper or green intaglio set into slabs of polished wood...'

Come on in, why don't you.