Giants at Madurodam: Miniature Holland Tour, 1960s

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Giants at Madurodam: Miniature Holland Tour, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Giants at Madurodam: Miniature Holland Tour, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-32B311

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Madurodam works on a single joke that never gets old to the people paying admission: adults the size of church steeples, strolling through a Holland built at one-twenty-fifth scale, gravely inspecting drawbridges they could step over. The 1960s tourist did not come to feel small, as at a cathedral or a canyon. He came to feel enormous, which is a rarer sensation and worth the guilder.

A man in a dark suit crosses the little municipal square as though late for a meeting with the miniature town council, oblivious to the fact that his shadow alone could black out a district. Around him families in their good touring clothes point cameras at spires no taller than a garden gnome, documenting a country that exists here in more perfect and better-maintained form than the real one waiting outside the gates.

A boy in a red shirt runs along the tiny quayside, the one visitor in the whole park still young enough to believe the buildings might actually be full size and he has simply grown very large. Everyone else has made their peace with the scale and moved on to the more serious business of being photographed next to it.

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