Eighth wonder of the world?

The single most jaw-droppingly mad thing I have ever seen is one of the top tourist attractions in the USA, but is virtually unknown outside the Midwest.

It’s The House on the Rock in Wisconsin.

I had the privilege of visiting this temple of madness in 1996, soon after being shown around the extraordinary Frank Lloyd Wright building of which it is a parody, Taliesin.

The story goes that Lloyd Wright dismissed one Alex Jordan Sr. from Taliesin with the words:

“I wouldn’t hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop.”

Jordan built the fabulously barking House on the Rock as his revenge, including such architectural monstrosities as the Infinity Room (below), a parody of the Bird Walk at Taliesin:

But, since Jordan Jr. took over from his father in the 40s, the attraction has grown with the progressive addition of warehouses (yes) full of collections of…stuff. It’s difficult to describe what these are about, because there doesn’t seem to be any logic to it. The best I can do is offer a semi-annotated list:

• Calliopes - easily over 30 steam organs, all playing their watery music, all day long
• Streets of Yesterday - a faux 19th century street of shops filled with Victoriana
• The World’s Largest Carousel - all 35 tonnes of it illuminated, with nearly 300 carved figures
• More dolls than I ever want to see again in my life
• Tin toy circuses - dozens of them
• The Organ Room - suspended walkways meander above and among a bewildering collection of cinema-style organs, like some nightmare Ken Adams set for The Phantom of the Opera
• The Cannon Room - featuring, you guessed it, the world’s largest cannon
• My personal favourite, the Sea Room - a warehouse with a long walkway slowly spiralling up the external walls glass jam-packed with display cases of memorabilia and model ships. All of this surrounds the best diorama ever, an extremely toothy blue whale fighting a giant squid on a boiling seascape. Scale, by this stage on your weary tour, is impossible to judge, so you have to take it on trust that the ‘whale’ is larger than a real blue whale.

If you are ever in the Midwest of the USA, you must see this place.

Three final comments:

1. There is much, much more than I have described, but at some point the poor human brain gives up and goes to lunch.
2. If the place sounds disturbing, just wait ’til you see it.
3. It is real. Really.