Bright, the Maze Man

From early childhood, Englishman Greg Bright has gone out of his way to get lost--in department stores, city streets, the countryside. "I've always very much dug the feeling of being lost. I've always been turned on by it." Since he was six, Bright has been turning himself on by designing mazes or labyrinths, those intricate networks of paths and chambers from which, once inside, the most mettlesome visitor may find it all but impossible to find a way out.

Turning lost into profit, Bright, now 23, has made a career of designing mazes. Greg Bright's Maze Book, a collection of his designs, is a current In book in London, and will be published next week by Pantheon Books in the U.S. For those who can afford the real thing--say, an acre complex of tortuous passages between tall, dense hedges--Bright will produce an original design costing around $10,000 (materials and labor not included). His latest project, commissioned by the wealthy Lord

Weymouth, will adorn Longleat House in Wiltshire, one of England's finest Elizabethan mansions, whose stately grounds were laid out by the legendary landscape architect Capability Brown. "Maze King" Bright, as he is known in Britain, will embellish Longleat with a lakefront, three-dimensional maze of yew hedges and no fewer than six covered bridges. The maze, when completed in several years, will be open to the public, but its secret, Bright has sworn, will be known only to himself and the Lord of Longleat.

Partial Values. Bright's plans are far more intricate than the famed Hampton Court Palace maze outside London ("Not much to solve there," sniffs Bright. " All you need to do is keep taking the left turn"). One Bright invention is what he calls the principle of "partial valves," by which, he says enigmatically, he introduces "a bias in a closed system of paths so I can make it more difficult to get from Point B to A than from A to B." Another feature of his people-traps is Bright's Principle

No. 2, "mutually accessible centers," by which he maintains "the charge and mystery of the maze" and manipulates the path follower back to the same spots over and over until he is ready to call in a helicopter. On the other hand, Bright says, "some people derive a sense of cosmic energy" from mazes.

Greg Bright's Maze Book, subtitled Extraordinary Puzzles for Extraordinary People, is a collection of some three dozen pen-and-ink drawings that are not only a fiendishly frustrating challenge to the cocktail-table Theseus but also are art works of amazing--so to speak--delicacy and variety. Some resemble Op art, others an elaborate electronic circuit; they look like a nexus of noodles, or paranoid doodles, or 18th century chinoiserie. Some of these Bright ideas are even designed with no exits or entrances.

Despite his flak--some say genius--for topology, Welsh-born, London-reared Greg Bright dropped out of school at 17. Ever since, he has been making mazes with paper, books and furniture and, on one project, known as the Pilton maze, he created a mile-long serpentine of ditches in a muddy meadow, most of which he dug himself, working "like a rabid mole."

Ultimate Maze. Bright, a bachelor who wears his long blond hair in a ponytail, also works hard at such varied pursuits as composing rock music, acting and writing books and plays. After a show of his labyrinths at London's prestigious Institute of Contemporary Arts this fall, he plans to sell framed reproductions of his designs. Recently he toyed with the idea of an "ultimate" or "life-or-death" maze. He would have to construct it, says Bright, at either the North or South Pole and would use a heated tool to carve up blocks of polar ice for his walls. "Someone entering it," he notes cheerfully, "would have to get out quickly or die of exposure."

The maze king now professes to dislike mazes: "I am not, nor ever have been, nor ever will be obsessed with mazes." But he will publish another maze book this fall. He is contemplating a maze with mirrors for walls. He also hopes to bring mazemania to the U.S., which at this stage can certainly use all the cosmic energy it can get.

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