Beauty Dan Cruickshank's Adventures in Architecture

Mankind has created brilliant architecture all over the world.

Buildings shaped by our ambitions, our instincts,

our hopes and dreams.

Shared human desires that inspired incredible buildings.

This is the story of how architecture has defined the way we live.

The architecture of tyranny and power.

Architecture to lift the human spirit.

The architecture of death and resurrection.

And the architecture of paradise on earth.

My journey starts with man's dream of creating beauty.

On top of the world, the beauty of a simple igloo.

In the Far East, the beauty of a sacred face.

The brilliant decoration of a Russian palace.

The divine beauty of human passion

proclaimed on an Indian temple.

And the terrifying beauty of a towering French cathedral.

WIND HOWLING

BARKING

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.

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?

Yeah. Very good snow here.

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 five-teen.

-Fifty?

Five-oh? Fifty?

A lot of work. OK. They're heavy.

So I take, er...

50?! Good Lord!

Ah... Right.

London seems sweet at this moment.

Does it matter where we put the first block?

OK...

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 like the top of an eggshell.

It's a sort of ovoid dome, not a semicircle, so that the forces,

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 lots of domes is they thrust outwards and want to 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.

As far as I can understand it,

the blocks start to spiral up at 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 all stays firm.

So really, it's sort of being glued together with ice.

Igloos are immensely strong when completed, but constructing a dome

without props or scaffolding is a perilous undertaking.

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 is gonna 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 is 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.

BARKING

-Dogs.

-Dogs? Ah!

We're interrupted by a hunter returning to his village.

So, can I see what you've got?

What have you got here?

-Polar bear.

-Polar bear? Really?!

Are there many polar bears around here?

-A lot?

-Yes, many.

Many? Can I see?

Well, it's very shocking, isn't it, a polar bear shot?

I feel shocked, but you've got to 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.

Its plaintive expression is heartbreaking.

Oh, I see.

Back inside, all that remains are the finishing touches.

Good? Good. So that's half.

Yeah. That's it.

So you spin it.

I see, I see.

Cunning.

It's the keystone or capstone.

-Fine!

-Well done, Andreas, well done!

Thank you very much. Congratulations. Excellent.

It's a beautiful igloo.

Tense at moments, but thank goodness we've finished it.

It looks terrific inside.

Here we are. It's complete.

An incredible sense of achievement. We've actually made our own igloo.

I must admit, externally it looks a trifle peculiar,

a rather personal piece of work,

more of a cone than a dome,

a 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.

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.

And 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's 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 he 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.

And 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 round the Buddha,

seeking a path to enlightenment.

The huge size of the image reveals that his spiritual power is without limit.

The Buddha comes in many different forms,

and the Leshan statue has a particular meaning.

Ah, 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, a 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 that the Buddha is full of bliss,

compassion, understanding.

The 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.

BELL RINGING

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 that mean we should have hope for the future?

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 facelift in 2001,

and is now badly stained again.

These chaps are trying to brush away these dark stains,

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.

St Petersburg in the depths of winter.

It's 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 St 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 St 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's 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's 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 metamorphoses 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 mosaic, a sort of massive tapestry.

This really is a triumph of interior decoration.

Ah, 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.

And 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 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,

encompass the power of the sun god.

And what a very appropriate material for an imperial palace.

Amber, made from fossilised 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 ten 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 a 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?

And so the beauty of the Catherine Palace lives again.

The eastern coast of India...

..where the beauty of the human body can be a sacred thing.

I've come to see a temple which is one of the most magnificent

and richly ornamented in India,

which has dominated this coast on the Bay of Bengal for centuries.

But despite the temple's architectural wonder,

it's 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-13th 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,

rolling 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, energises all the sculpture on the temple.

Ah, this is the dance hall.

This is where the devadasis, the temple dancing girls,

would have performed, and you can see them here

carved onto the architecture dancing.

This one, beautiful creature with a drum, a musical instrument.

Right here, they danced. Imagine it.

Originally, this was a roofed structure, dark, mysterious, magical,

and 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 the 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 the 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.

These are 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 really hard work!

Here, a woman's presenting certain bodily fluids to an altar

on which burns a sacred flame.

Such fluids were 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 it was a cyclone in the past that damaged the building,

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.

The town of Albi, in the historic region of Languedoc.

It's now the perfect image of a peaceful French town.

But in the Middle Ages, it wasn't part of France.

It was a place of persecution and terror

from which emerged a vision of powerful, sinister beauty.

This is Albi Cathedral,

part house of prayer, part fortress.

It was begun in the late 13th century by the Catholic Church

to oppress the local population and terrify it into submission.

Even today, the cathedral's scale and brooding presence

instils awe and astonishment.

The building's bold, functional forms

give it an abstract, sculptural, poetic power,

and the mellow red bricks are absolutely sensational.

Albi was at the heart of one of the Middle Ages' most savage crusades,

as Catholic forces from northern France

sought to vanquish the people of Languedoc.

The town had embraced the Cathar religion,

which branded the Church of Rome materialistic and satanic.

In turn, the Pope declared them heretics

and a cathedral was built to suppress the Cathar religion for ever.

The cathedral's all about power. Worldly power, rather than spiritual.

It's a fortress, of course.

The walls are incredibly thick at their base

to stop them being pierced by battering rams,

and the windows are high and narrow

so they can't be entered by intruders.

The interior's now richly decorated, but all of this is later.

When new, the interior would have been gaunt, vast, sublime,

rather intimidating, I should think.

Quite what the people of Albi though about this interior, it's hard to know,

but surely they would have been impressed by its vast scale,

by its bold simplicity, by its terrible beauty.

In a triumph of military engineering,

Albi's huge weight is carried on massive buttresses

set between the windows, projecting into the building

and pierced only by a series of small doorways.

Here, defence was all-important.

The outer walls are incredibly thick and strong to keep out attackers,

and the buttresses, usually outside, have been brought inside.

And here's one of them, a massive piece of construction.

These buttresses hold up much of the vault above the nave.

The thinking was if these were outside,

they could be demolished by attackers and the whole building would come tumbling down.

The cathedral has an incredibly commanding view over the town,

the river and the surrounding countryside,

and it would have been very castle-like originally.

It would have been like a great castle tower, a keep,

because down there were walls and towers

and even a gatehouse with a drawbridge, all defending it.

Whoever ruled the cathedral ruled this land.

As the cathedral grew tall, the Church launched an inquisition,

forcing people to declare their allegiance to the Pope or be executed.

By the early 14th century,

the persecution of Cathars reached violent extremes.

The Inquisition's grip on the town was now absolute.

The bodies of alleged heretics were dug up, defiled, burnt,

just to let the people here know about the perils of disobedience

to the Roman Catholic Church.

And then there was the presence of the cathedral,

a perpetual reminder of who was in control.

The cathedral continued to expand

long after the Inquisition had crushed the spirit of the Cathars.

But one piece of decoration is a reminder of the savage beauty

at the heart of Albi Cathedral.

No doubt as a frightful warning to the community,

this astonishing painting was unveiled in the 1480s.

It shows the judgment that Christians believe will take place at the end of time,

when the dead rise up from their graves

and are judged and consigned to Heaven or to Hell.

This painting is amazing because it doesn't show any of the promises

of Paradise, simply the torments, the suffering of the damned in Hell.

Amazing scenes are being enacted here.

People are being broken on the wheel,

other people are being boiled in cauldrons,

and one woman is being forced to swallow something absolutely horrid.

It looks like a snake. Others are being sick.

What people here made of this, I really cannot imagine,

though of course, any Cathars lingering in the community,

this was meant for them, wasn't it?

It was to tell them this is the fate awaiting them

if they do not surrender to the will of the Church in Rome.

This is one of the most intriguing, perplexing and for me,

most architecturally exciting buildings in the world.

It was created to oppress and terrify people, yet in its design,

there's a purity, a bold simplicity,

a clarity that leads to beauty, a beauty that moves my soul.

So here we can see good coming out of evil

and mean intentions leading to a masterpiece.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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