DAN CRUICKSHANK: Mankind has created
brilliant architecture all over the world,
bound by common themes and instincts,
shared human desires that shaped incredible buildings.
This is a story of architecture through humanity.
The architecture of power,
of dreams,
of death,
and paradise.
But none is more moving than the quest for beauty.
Beauty in simplicity and nature.
Beauty in a sacred face.
The extraordinary beauty of ornament.
And the divine beauty of human passion.
(CALLING TO DOGS)
I'm in the Arctic Circle
travelling towards the North Pole across a frozen world.
This is a vast, limitless land.
It feels as old
as the Earth itself.
Pure,
unchanging.
Golly, being here is like being at the beginning of time.
I've come to celebrate an ancient, elemental,
and beautiful structure.
But because temperatures in the Arctic are rising faster than anywhere else,
it's a structure that could soon be lost forever.
(COMMANDING DOGS)
My guide is Andreas Sanimuinaq,
and together we're going to build an igloo,
a structure that reveals the origin of architecture,
when man first created shelter
from hostile weather and prowling beasts.
So this is good snow?
ANDREAS SANIMUINAQ: Yeah, very good snow here.
CRUICKSHANK: The igloo, a creation of the Inuit culture,
was used as a winter home and shelter on hunting expeditions.
The people here still hunt, but few build igloos.
Andreas is one of the last men to keep the tradition alive,
using knowledge passed down from his father,
a legendary hunter.
It's big.
It's very big.
That's ambitious.
The blocks are cut from snow,
compacted by the wind to the right consistency.
I mean, how many blocks do we need? How many...
-I don't know. -Guess.
Maybe 50.
-Fifty? -Yeah, 50.
5-0, 50?
A lot of work. Okay. They're heavy.
So, right, I'll take...
(BOTH LAUGHING)
(CRUICKSHANK GRUNTING)
Fifty!
Good Lord.
Right.
London seems sweet at this moment.
Does it matter where we put the first block?
Yeah.
CRUICKSHANK: The blocks are laid in a clockwise direction,
following the motion of the sun
as it moves through the sky from dawn to dusk.
The way it works is very simple.
This particular sort of dome is rather like the top of an eggshell.
It's a sort of a ovoid dome, not a semi-circle,
so that the force of the weight
of the blocks, and they are heavy I can tell you,
are taken more or less straight down to the ground.
The trouble with these sorts of domes, they thrust outwards
and want to sort of fall down, but the igloo is incredibly strong.
And it supports its own weight, and a lot of other things besides,
when it's completed.
But it is quite hard work to build.
The miracle of the igloo is that the weakest building material possible,
frozen water, achieves strength through brilliant engineering.
After a couple of layers of blocks, the walls start sloping inwards.
Andreas cuts one into a wedge shape.
A lot of intuitive engineering skills here with Andreas.
He's making this structure sort of perform in an amazing way.
Far as I can understand it, the blocks start to spar up
some point down here.
And each block is cunningly shaped.
It's all held together by a good bit of bashing
and manoeuvring which creates friction, which sort of melts a bit of the snow,
and then that freezes. And it just stays firm.
So really, it's all being glued together with ice.
Igloos are immensely strong when completed,
but constructing a dome without props or scaffolding
is a perilous undertaking.
Ready?
-Yeah. -Yeah.
I'm really beginning to wonder about this igloo.
It almost feels like it's about to cave in on me.
And the next course above this are going to be even steeper,
virtually horizontal. Can't quite see how it's going to work.
The final stages are hazardous.
Problematic joins are fixed with intricate ice carpentry.
And the familiar shape keeps on growing.
The dome's regarded as one of the high points of our architectural culture,
particularly celebrated as a hallmark of Roman engineering genius.
Yet, in this culture, isolated, remote from our own,
the dome also developed
to meet particular environmental problems and demands.
It's incredible that two cultures so different
should come up with the same architectural form.
(DOGS BARKING)
-Dogs. -Dogs.
(SPEAKING GREENLANDIC)
(BARKING CONTINUES)
CRUICKSHANK: We're interrupted by a hunter returning to his village.
So, can I see what you've got? What have you got here?
AGE HAMMEKEN: Polar bear. CRUICKSHANK: Polar bear. Really?
Are there many polar bears around here?
(SPEAKING GREENLANDIC)
-CRUICKSHANK: A lot? -Yes, many.
-Many? -Yeah.
Can I see?
(IN GREENLANDIC)
Well, it's very shocking, isn't it? Polar bear, shot.
I feel shocked, but...
But remember, this is not shot for fun,
it's not shot by a tourist as a trophy.
This chap's a member of one of the last true hunting communities
in the world. He's a licensed hunter.
These guys have to hunt to live, that's it.
So this is
what's going to keep him and his family alive,
the food, the skin, eating and selling.
And that's the truth of the matter.
But it's very moving, though, very moving.
There it is, this wonderful beast, the polar bear...
His plaintive expression is heartbreaking.
Oh, I see.
Back inside, all that remains are the finishing touches.
Fine, fine.
-Good? -Yeah.
-CRUICKSHANK: Good. So that's half. -It's good, yeah.
Yeah. That's it.
So you spin it.
I see, I see.
Coming.
It's the keystone capped into...
ANDREAS: Fine.
Well done, Andreas. Well done.
Thank you very much. Congratulations. Excellent.
-I mean, it's a beautiful igloo. -Thank you.
Tenser moments,
but, you know, thank goodness we finished,
and it looks terrific inside.
Here we are. It's complete.
Incredible sense of achievement. We've made our own igloo.
I must admit that externally it looks a little, well, a trifle,
peculiar, rather personal piece of work.
More of a cone
than a dome, bit like a beehive.
But it's immensely strong,
I must say, standing here, contemplating it,
it looks like a really ancient piece of architecture,
the first building in the world.
(EXCLAIMS)
Inside, the dome is superb,
sublime, it works.
The igloo is a wondrous machine.
The snow blocks, of course, are cold, but wonderful insulators,
and my body is hot.
This heat melts the surface of the snow,
and the liquid would run into the cracks here,
freeze and seal them.
So the whole thing really becomes
a building of ice rather than snow, eventually much stronger.
Absolutely fantastic.
The igloo contains all the basic ideas of architecture.
It's a practical shelter and a miniature masterpiece of engineering.
But above all, the igloo is beautiful.
Beautiful because of the logic,
the clarity of the thinking behind its design and construction.
Beautiful because it seems so simple, yet is also so complex in its function.
And of course, beautiful because of its form,
the celestial dome, the symbol of the sun in this icy land.
This is the city of Leshan,
in the heart of China's Sichuan province.
Sichuan is famous the world over for its fiery and exhilarating food.
Gosh, that is delicious, but it is indeed very spicy, hot.
All these are chillies.
But there's not just food for the body in Leshan,
there's also food for the soul.
In this city, there's an object that forms a bridge
between the physical world and the spiritual.
An object that uses beauty and scale to inflame the imagination,
to overawe the senses.
Leshan was once a fishing village surrounded by treacherous waters.
There's a local legend the water was controlled by an evil spirit.
But in the eighth century,
Buddhist monks created a colossus to calm the torrents.
Over there, across these waters,
is the largest stone-carved image of the Buddha from the ancient world.
I'm agog to see it.
Here is the giant Buddha at Leshan.
Golly, he's absolutely enormous.
Everything about such a vast work of art,
made over a long period of time with so much effort,
is full of meaning.
The posture, the proportions, the details.
The solemn and serene expression on the Buddha's face.
This is beauty at a truly sublime scale.
Carved out of the rock face, the Buddha is over 70 metres high
and took 90 years to complete.
And it remains a wonder.
A sculpture so large that it's a work of architecture.
This towering, compelling, spiritually charged beauty
draws people here in their thousands,
tourists and believers.
The Buddha lived around 2,500 years ago.
For believers, the Buddha brought to humanity the key to enlightenment,
the way to escape worldly desires and reach Nirvana.
Gradually the Buddha, the wise man and great teacher,
was worshipped as a god.
And around 1,900 years ago, he started to be portrayed,
not in almost abstract form as a column or as a wheel,
but as a human being.
I suppose that made it easier for people to identify with him.
But from the very start, this human portrayal of Buddha
was often on a vast scale.
Clearly in Buddhism, size mattered. The bigger, the more beautiful.
When it was first created,
the Buddha was enclosed by an immense, wooden temple.
Only his face was left exposed.
Monks would have sheltered under the Buddha's shadow,
living and worshipping in these small caves in the cliff face.
So the Buddha would have been within a temple, an enclosed space.
Imagine the atmosphere,
the chanting, the colours, the great image towering above.
Here, people would have sat meditating, concentrating
on the colossal scale of the image.
It would have liberated their imagination.
An incredible, moving experience for them sitting here,
the great Buddha in front of them.
It would have been a living being. Incredible.
Pilgrims walk clockwise around the Buddha
seeking the path to enlightenment.
The huge size of the image reveals that its spiritual power is without limit.
The Buddha comes in many different forms,
and the Leshan statue has a particular meaning.
Oh, the head of Buddha, at last.
We meet face-to-face.
This really is a very robust beauty.
In fact, this colossal image of Buddha
is a particular manifestation of the Buddha.
It's Maitreya, a Buddha-to-be, the Buddha of the future.
Quite when Maitreya arrives is a matter of debate.
It seems he'll come when he's needed,
when the old Buddhist faith is eroded,
when the world is coming to its end, when the world is in extremis.
When pilgrims ascend this mountain and behold Maitreya's face,
they must feel they've already reached Nirvana.
This is a beauty that could save their souls.
As with a sacred building, every detail on the head is full of meaning.
The ears, with the long earlobes.
That reflects an Oriental idea of beauty,
signifying a developed, refined human being.
The eyes, with their transcendental gaze,
that shows the Buddha is full of bliss, compassion, understanding.
Little coiled buns of hair on his head,
each like a little shrine, a diagram in itself
to inspire and help meditation.
On the top of the head is this bump,
the bump that reflects the possession of a cosmic brain.
That's the route to Nirvana.
(BELLS RINGING)
(MONKS CHANTING)
Monks no longer live in the cliff face, but they still worship here.
Buddhism was repressed during China's Cultural Revolution.
This temple, located just behind the Buddha's head, was shut down.
But monks and believers have returned once more
to pray for the arrival of Maitreya.
So, Maitreya's the Buddha of the future, but what exactly does that mean?
Does it mean we should have hope for the future?
(ABBOT HONGHUA SPEAKING MANDARIN)
CRUICKSHANK: Maitreya is supposed to return when the world's in torment,
and perhaps that moment is now.
The Leshan Buddha is slowly being defaced by pollution.
The Buddha received a major face-lift in 2001,
but is now badly stained again.
These chaps are trying to brush away these dark stains
of the tracks of tears.
The trouble is, the acid rain is slowly, remorselessly eroding the sandstone.
Wrought from the entire cliff face,
this giant figure creates a sense of awe.
It's a personification of the wonder and the wisdom of nature.
For me, the fantastic giant Buddha
is emblematic of the beauty of the world.
A world that man now seems set on destroying
through ruthless exploitation of natural resources, through global warming,
through pollution, through acid rain.
Incredibly, the giant Buddha
is a warning from the past to the present about the future.
Saint Petersburg, in the depths of winter,
is Russia's most fashionable city,
even when the temperature is way below zero.
The city was founded by Peter the Great 300 years ago,
but Saint Petersburg is also the triumph of a great woman,
Peter's daughter, Empress Elizabeth I.
It was her taste for opulence and grandeur
that made Saint Petersburg beautiful.
She dressed up the city in colourful and extravagant Baroque architecture
that expressed national pride.
And I've come to see Elizabeth's most personal and ornate creation.
In Northwest Russia, rising from the snow,
is a hot-blooded Baroque masterpiece.
It's Russia's own Versailles,
a building in which beauty is used as a political weapon,
as an expression of divine majesty.
This is the Catherine Palace,
which Elizabeth named after her beloved mother.
This palace was designed in the 1750s
by an architect with Italian blood, Bartolomeo Rastrelli.
The building's enormous length
is a grand display of imperial power and order.
But this intimidating scale
is enlivened with exuberant and joyful details.
Rastrelli is the architect, but this building's not about him.
He was merely the means by which Elizabeth expressed her nature,
her passions, her loves, her aspirations.
This building is an almost shockingly personal portrait
of a most unusual woman.
The exterior of the Catherine Palace
is one of the world's most sensational, classical compositions
but the real glories are inside.
The palace is organised around the Golden Enfilade,
an awe-inspiring route that took you to the imperial presence.
The straight route through Elizabeth's palace,
originally nearly 325 metres in length,
was like a test for those granted admission to this magical world.
The highest in the land and those most in favour with the Empress
would penetrate deepest.
The grandest room was the colossal Great Hall,
where Elizabeth received visitors while seated on her throne.
The vastness of the hall,
the huge array of mirrors and gilded figures
were designed to bewitch the senses and confirm her godlike status.
This wasn't only Elizabeth's throne room, but also her playroom.
This became the centre of her hedonistic world.
It was here that she held her famed metamorphosis balls
in which men dressed as women, and women dressed as men.
Such cross-dressing in parties in the 18th century wasn't unusual,
but mostly people would wear masks.
But here, by Elizabeth's orders, nobody wore masks.
People were themselves but strangely transformed,
which is, I suppose, why these parties were not very popular
with Elizabeth's courtiers and nobles.
And as privileged visitors moved deeper into the palace,
the decorative schemes became ever more ingenious.
This really is one of the strangest rooms in the palace.
The walls are covered by old master oil paintings
purchased by Elizabeth,
but organised not by subject, style, artist or date,
but simply by size and by colour.
They're rammed together to make a sort of a mosaic or massive tapestry.
This really is a triumph of interior decoration.
Now I can meet Elizabeth herself.
This portrait shows her in her prime.
It's all to do with power and wealth expressed through beauty,
beautiful architecture and beautiful clothes.
But what of the woman beneath all this pomp?
Look at her face. It looks homely, somewhat earthy,
far from cruel and arrogant.
She loved architecture,
and she created one of the most spectacular buildings in the world.
I like her.
But Elizabeth's greatest triumph was the installation of the Amber Room,
the crowning architectural glory of her reign.
This is a room with an almost magical quality.
It's haunted the Western imagination for centuries.
It's been regarded as the most enigmatic and most beautiful room ever created.
It's been called the eighth wonder of the world.
It's a hymn to the beauty of nature
because its walls are covered with amber,
a very valuable natural material
that anciently was thought to be sunlight petrified,
encompassed the power of the sun god.
And what a very appropriate material for an imperial palace.
Amber, made from fossilized tree resin, was rare and expensive.
This exclusive material
was used to create a rarefied and fantastical world.
But these are not the amber panels installed by Elizabeth.
This Amber Room, a perfect copy, is less than 10 years old.
The palace was a victim of fighting during the Second World War.
When German soldiers retreated after the siege of Leningrad,
the building was left to ruin.
But after the war,
it became an issue of national pride to restore Elizabeth's vision of beauty.
The restoration is ambitious.
The designs, materials and techniques are authentic.
But does the spirit of Elizabeth's lost palace really live again?
Why is it important to restore lost beauty?
Why is it important to restore the Catherine Palace?
(IN RUSSIAN)
(PLAYING RHYTHMIC MUSIC)
I've come to see a temple,
which is one of the most magnificent and richly ornamented in India,
which has dominated this coast in the Bay of Bengal for centuries.
But despite the temple's architectural wonder,
it has puzzled, shocked and appalled people.
It's been called the most beautiful building in the world
and also the most obscene.
What's certain, though,
is that it's a sensational monument to the power of sex.
The temple was once positioned right on the beach.
But over the centuries,
the land between the ocean and the temple grew
and it's now stranded inland in the small town of Konarak.
The temple was built in the mid-thirteenth century
by a local Hindu king.
It's dedicated to the sun god, Surya.
But there are more unusual sculptures here.
The walls are covered with beautiful images
of people in the most intimate embrace.
This building has more graphic sex acts depicted on it
than any other temple in India.
The whole temple's conceived as the mighty chariot
on which the sun god, Surya, is drawn through the sky
from dawn until dusk.
And number is all-important here.
The chariot's furnished with 24 massive wheels
which represent the 24 bright and dark moons of each year.
The chariot's drawn by seven prancing steeds,
symbolising, of course, the seven days of the week.
The temple's not just a celestial vehicle.
It's also a time machine, or rather, a magic machine,
outside time, roaming through eternity.
And all is organised around the sun.
The main door faces East towards the rising sun,
which brings new life with every dawn.
And as the sun moves around the building,
it brings to life, energizes, all the sculpture on the temple.
This is the dance hall.
This is where the devadasis, the temple dancing girls,
would have performed,
and you can see them here, carved into the architecture, dancing.
This one, a beautiful creature
with a drum and a musical instrument.
Wonderful! Right here, they danced. Imagine it.
Originally, this was a roofed structure,
dark, mysterious, magical.
The girls dancing to please the god and to please the Brahmin priests.
These girls had a high status,
just below that of the priests themselves, but
they may have participated in the rites particular and peculiar to this temple.
For centuries, the sexual images have confused and alarmed people.
One British commissioner during the raj denounced them as beastly
and said it would be better
if the whole place was levelled to the ground.
Today, the temple's swarming with inquisitive tourists and schoolchildren,
who seem a little more relaxed.
But what's this sexual imagery all about?
The meaning of this building has long puzzled people.
But I believe some of the answers must lie in the Hindu faith itself.
When the temple was being constructed,
tantric practices were gaining strength in northeast India.
And in tantra, the idea is that power can be obtained from nature
and contact made with the divine through the medium of the body.
Sex plays a very important role.
Sexual bliss is seen as akin
to the joy, the ecstasy of enlightenment, of union with a god.
So a building like this, full of sexual images
are really images to do with divine practices.
Sex, orgasm, is seen as opening a window
onto the divine.
The belief that sexual activity could lead to spiritual enlightenment
was particular to the more radical school of tantric thinking,
which challenged most established Hindu conventions.
So people who created these images had very specific beliefs.
They believed in the sacred nature of bodily fluids.
And once you understand that, all of this begins to make sense.
It's not just images of people seeking gratification,
but images of people feasting on divine nectar, the stuff of life.
The stuff of immortality.
Fluid is central to the Hindu creation myth,
in which life springs from an ocean of milk.
And during sexual activity, the bodily fluids unite to create life.
They are the nectar of immortality.
The ways in which this nectar was extracted and distributed
can only leave you lost in wonder.
Such invention, such gymnastics.
Some of it looks like really hard work.
Here, a woman is presenting certain bodily fluids to an altar
on which burns a sacred flame.
Such fluids are vital offerings to tantric deities.
And animals, which according to Hindu belief
contain a soul on a journey, were not left out.
Here, a thoughtful young lady is giving a dog, I believe, a divine meal.
The final mystery of the Sun Temple is its end.
After being a place of worship for more than 400 years,
it was abandoned.
Already by the early 17th century, it was a desolate ruin,
half-buried in the sand.
And the interior now is simply full of stone.
Why this happened we do not know.
Perhaps there was a cyclone in the past,
that damaged the building and made it no longer auspicious for the god.
Perhaps local people turned against it.
What we do know is that the great kalash,
the great pot on the top of the pyramid that symbolically contained ambrosia,
the stuff of immortality, that pot, has long gone.
This temple is now an extraordinary place.
It's a slumbering giant.
The spiritual power of the place has been reduced,
but it's far from lost.
People flock here to wonder at the architecture and the sculpture,
to try and understand the temple's mysteries and secrets.
What they make of it, of course, depends on their individual natures.
To the pure, all is pure.
To those of evil intentions, all is evil.
I see the temple as a great temple of joy,
a temple to the power of sex.