Power Dan Cruickshank's Adventures in Architecture

This is a journey to explore the architecture of power.

In Romania, the iron grip of a despot over his people.

In the American South,

the architecture of slavery.

In Istanbul...

..a building to enslave women.

HE BLOWS WHISTLE

In Kazakhstan, alien architecture to assert the power of a new nation.

And in the Middle East,

a last bastion of the Crusader Knights.

The capital of Romania, Bucharest.

A city that once straddled the cultural divide

between eastern and western Europe, known as the Paris of the Balkans.

Bucharest was transformed in the 1980s by Nicolae Ceausescu,

Europe's last communist dictator.

I'm heading towards the Palace of the People,

one of the most outrageous monuments to despotic rule the world has ever seen.

The palace was to be both Ceausescu's personal residence

and home to all aspects of government,

a building that would secure his grip on power.

From here, the building's at its most ominous, most threatening.

The windows, like hundreds of eyes, observing

and controlling.

This is the epitome of Big Brother architecture.

Golly, this interior is power personified.

Power achieved through intimidating scale that dwarfs,

and the use of ruthless, repetitive

classical architecture.

Classicism that's impersonal, this funereal white marble.

'The palace contains over 1,000 rooms,

'a never-ending parade of extravagance.'

In floor area, it's the largest building in the world after the Pentagon in Washington.

No expense was spared.

There's estimated to be over one million tonnes of marble,

and over 3,500 tonnes of crystal,

used to decorate the lavish interiors.

700 architects and 20,000 workers

toiled in shifts 24 hours a day.

The overall cost was said to have exceeded £2 billion.

Ceausescu wanted his palace to be a triumph for Romania.

Everything from the chandeliers to the carvings had to be made in the country.

This is the room in which Ceausescu would've signed documents of state.

It's huge, it's absurd.

The climax of the building, the size and grandeur of this room,

was designed to make visitors feel small and insignificant

before the master statesman.

If you were left in any doubt that you were in the grips of a man of power,

then you just had to have a look from this balcony.

It's like a kick in the guts.

From here, you can see the scale of Ceausescu's monstrous ambition.

It's been estimated that he destroyed one-fifth of central Bucharest,

to create a ceremonial route to his palace, known as the Boulevard of Socialist Victory.

13 churches and over 9,000 homes were torn down,

displacing at least 40,000 people.

This was the most vicious attack on architecture and history

in Europe since the Second World War.

Even though the Romanian population would suffer power cuts and food shortages,

Ceausescu was determined his palace would be unrivalled.

He held a competition.

A young and ambitious architect was chosen to do his bidding.

WOMAN SPEAKS ROMANIAN

Many people may find this building oppressive,

because they lost their homes for its construction.

What do you say to those people?

But Ceausescu was ruthless and obsessed.

The palace would prevail... at any cost.

This vast, formal room was intended for state receptions.

It's called the ballroom.

I can't imagine they would've been very warm, these receptions, a very chilling interior.

It would be dominated by gigantic portraits,

of Ceausescu at one end and his wife, Elena, at the other.

All we have now is large, empty marble panels.

The paintings were never to be installed.

Ceausescu never saw his palace completed.

In December 1989, to his utter bewilderment, the people at last rebelled against his rule.

Three days later, on Christmas Day,

Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad.

But his death left the Romanian people with a dilemma -

what should they do with the vast monument

that symbolised Ceausescu's reign?

What happened next was extraordinary.

Ceausescu's palace was transformed into the home of Romanian democracy.

This grandiose room is the senate.

It was designed as a great hall in which Ceausescu would receive heads of state.

This building is rich in irony.

What was to be the domain of a despot,

has become the symbol of a new, democratic Romania.

What was Ceausescu's Palace has now become Palace of Parliament.

The Romanian parliament began to move into this building in 1994,

just five years after the death of the dictator.

The people are obliged, for practical and economic reasons,

to use a building that is a monument to their oppression.

This long, straight boulevard, combined with this domineering palace,

is the ultimate expression of an architectural dream

that has haunted the imagination of despots for thousands of years.

This is power personified.

But I must say this is the grimmest expression of that dream I have ever seen.

So, what's going to happen now?

The people of this city are learning to live with this building,

but will they ever learn to love it?

On the shores of the eastern Mediterranean

lies a land sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims...

the Holy Land.

MAN CALLS OUT

Oh! Shukran.

Off the Mediterranean coast of Syria stands one of the most historically

important and architecturally powerful castles ever built.

For over 100 years,

it stood defiantly at the meeting point of two worlds,

the Muslim and the Christian, and, in the end,

it alone kept Christian hopes alive in the Holy Land.

In the 12th century, Marqab was one of the largest castles controlled by the Crusader Knights,

part of a mighty European army that fought to reclaim the Holy Land for the Christian faith.

But in 1188, Saladin, the most successful Muslim commander, had just defeated the Crusader army.

And one of the last great bastions that stood between him

and control of the Holy land was Marqab.

Saladin must have stood just about here.

This location to the south east of the castle is the best place to view its defensive works.

A contemporary chronicle says he thought the place impregnable and impossible to take.

It's very large and set in a naturally strong position,

the plateau top fortified

with a series of walls and mighty round towers.

The physical power of the castle allowed it to command a huge area of land,

extracting tribute from its neighbours for almost a century.

For Saladin, it was both a military and an economic prize.

Saladin will also have noted that

the castle's made of hard volcanic basalt, a very tough material.

And he'd have recognised that the castle's a fine, pioneering example of the science of military design.

I'll show you what I mean.

The basic plan of the castle is dictated by nature.

The rocky plateau on which it sits is triangular in shape,

so the perimeter wall is built

around the edge of the triangular plateau.

Then, within that, a higher wall is constructed

that overlooks the outer one.

Also the castle divides in two by a great wall here.

This is the castle town.

Up to 1,000 people lived there in 1200.

This is the citadel, and here the great donjon or keep.

To take the castle, you had to take that.

I'm in the space between the perimeter walls.

If I were an attacker, I'd be suffering terribly

because the defenders up there on the higher wall would be showering missiles onto me.

Now here is the gate to the citadel. I'd have to break my way through this,

that'd be quite difficult, I'm sure, massive defence.

And then I'd penetrate up.

And golly! I'm baffled.

There are several exits to left and right. What am I to do?

This is like entering a labyrinth.

The plan of the citadel is complicated, confusing,

all calculated to confound any attacker.

Where would one go?

There's these narrow alleys, arches leading left, right, up and down.

This is a fantastic machine of war, this castle.

Everything's designed to help the defender,

give them security in a hostile land.

For example, here there are four or five sort of...

different ways to go.

An arch there, stairs plunging into the bowels,

another arch here.

This divides again. Where on earth would an attacker go?

Well, I'll try this direction.

This is the Great Hall, the convivial heart of the castle,

where the garrison would have dined.

But even this is essentially

a bit of ruthless, functional military architecture,

part of the fighting capability of the castle.

It's vaulted with stone, very strong,

that's to protect it

from missiles being hurled in by enemy catapults outside.

Also this provides a very strong platform

on which the castle's catapults could be mounted

to fling stones back.

This castle wasn't just a fortress, it was also a monastery,

because the Crusader Knights who held this castle

were also a military order of monks, who had come to the Holy Land to look after pilgrims.

This stupendous building was built in about 1190 as a chapel,

a fantastic piece of early Gothic architecture.

This was an amazing world, a world where

holy men were fighting for the Holy Land.

The military order was the Knights Hospitallers.

Its members took monastic vows of poverty, chastity, obedience,

and in this little side chapel is something very amazing,

a fresco that dates from 1190.

It shows Christ with the 12 disciples

and what's incredible is that many of the faces survive.

These are not the faces of men

only of prayer but these are the faces of warriors.

Surely these are portraits of the Hospitallers here at the time when this fresco was painted.

It's very moving... These are

the faces of the men that made this castle great,

that rebuilt it and enlarged it, that made it one of the greatest castles in the Holy Land.

Massive defences could not ultimately save the castle.

Even this mighty keep with walls up to five metres thick

could not resist.

When the end came, it came from below.

These great works were undermined and so they tumbled.

A Muslim force arrived in 1285 and tunnelled beneath the huge keep,

fatally weakening the castle's defences.

Downhearted, with no hope of relief,

the Crusader Knights surrendered,

after a siege had lasted just five weeks.

The loss of Marqab marked the end of the crusader adventure.

The dream of a Christian state in the Holy Land was over.

This castle has a grim and brooding presence in the landscape.

It's a dark place really, an appropriate monument

to a particularly bloody epoch of human history, the Crusades.

The struggle between east and west, between Islam and Christianity.

A struggle which started with the bloody taking by the Christians of Jerusalem in 1099,

an event that shocked the Muslim world,

shocks it still, really,

an act of barbarity undertaken by a religion dedicated to love.

And this castle played a key role in the Crusades.

So, standing here, one cannot help but think about the legacy of that struggle,

the fact that it still goes on, in a way.

There's still religious wars, there's still bloodshed,

there's still pain and suffering in this region.

And this castle, in a way, and its history,

marks the beginning of that tragedy.

JAZZ MUSIC

New Orleans, Louisiana, in the American South.

This is a land with a troubled past.

The Mississippi River made the city rich,

but it wasn't just crops that were traded along its length.

Human beings were once sold down the river to work as slaves.

The city's moved on since then, but Hurricane Katrina of 2005,

and the massive floods that followed, reopened old wounds.

THEY SING

# Fly away...

# By, by, hallelujah, by and by

# Fly-y-y fly away... #

Wonderful. I'll Fly Away. I love it.

Really good.

What do you reckon the legacy of slavery is?

I think slavery is still going on, contemporary slavery.

The hurricane hit us, took four or five days for them to even come and see it.

My people were stuck on the roof for three days.

You don't have to have shackles on my feet and to be chained up for me to be a slave.

Slavery to me is a mental thing right now, contemporary.

You know what I'm saying? It's all contemporary.

Out of the city, hugging the banks of the Mississippi, snakes Louisiana's River Road.

It's hard to believe now, but for much of the 19th century,

this was the country's wealthiest highway, the home of millionaires.

And the relationship between these masters and the slaves they owned

is written into the very architecture of the region.

This is Evergreen...

..a sugar-cane plantation where once 200 people lived and worked.

But the hard labour went on behind the scenes.

Evergreen's public face was this grand family mansion,

dramatically remodelled in the 1830s by its owner, Michel Pierre Becnel.

Becnel was an ambitious man.

He saw himself as more than just a farmer, he was a gentleman.

And his social and cultural aspirations are reflected in the architecture he commissioned.

He did everything he could to magnify the importance of his house,

and by doing that, to magnify the importance of his family.

The secret of the success here are these giant columns.

They really put this house in the major league,

they make it look like a grand mansion.

Also they fulfil a rather clever visual trick.

They make what is quite a small house look vast.

Becnel spent so much on Evergreen that he went bankrupt.

But he got the grandeur he so much desired.

The details of the house are Greek revival,

a style that was internationally fashionable in the early 19th century.

And here, in front of me, is a wonderful example.

This door case...it's very sophisticated.

In the United States, Greek revival architecture had a particular meaning and importance.

It almost represented national identity, it represented civilisation, liberty and freedom.

But, in the South, it was favoured for perhaps less noble reasons,

because Greece had been an ancient democracy, but a democracy that supported slavery.

Gosh, the er...interior is very opulent,

and the Greek revival theme is continued -

Ionic capitals here, Greek revival fire surround.

And this is the main entertaining room of the house.

Here, the family would have gathered,

and here, they would have held parties.

This door is the clue, a wide door with a double leaf.

That's to allow ladies in um...

great crinoline dresses to pass through with ease,

circulating around the interior.

At the back of the mansion, everything is ordered, neat, symmetrical.

The outbuildings look like chess pieces on a green board.

Even the outdoor privy, temple-like in appearance, is an essay in classical geometry.

It's all designed to send out a message about man's control over nature,

but also speaks of man's control over other men.

Behind the mansion lies a different world.

This was where Evergreen's field slaves lived,

in cabins separated from the world of the master,

but laid out with the same symmetrical rigour.

The slave quarters here now look charmingly picturesque,

the cabins in a romantic state of decay,

and they're sheltered by enchanting shadows

cast by this avenue of wonderful oak trees.

But things would have been very different when slaves lived here.

The oaks wouldn't have been here. This was a grim industrial road,

with uniform and utilitarian cabins set on each side.

At one end was the mill,

and at the other, the River Road and the Mississippi.

Feeding the sugar mill was harsh work.

At harvest time, the slaves laboured 16 hours a day,

seven days a week, to reap the tall, tough crop.

This is a copy of the inventory drawn up when Becnel went bankrupt.

It's in French, then the legal language of Louisiana,

and of course it lists his slaves.

And here we have them. Each one is numbered, named,

and his sort of profession, trade, described.

For example, number two is Rancon, aged 37, described as commander,

capable of directing works on the plantation, so he's an overseer.

Then there's Phill, aged 34.

He's a sugar-worker and described here as a negro of confidence.

That means he would be trusted to go down the river by himself to New Orleans,

delivering goods, I guess, something like that.

But of course, these slaves are listed in the inventory because they're merely assets.

Each one has a price tag next to his name in dollars.

In the end, these human beings were only property.

housed sometimes as many as 16 to a cabin.

Gosh, pretty compact accommodation,

but in fact what you're seeing is two houses.

There would have been a partition down here.

I can see the mark on the floor.

So it's a very minimal construction, just timber posts with boarding outside.

Perhaps there would have been some insulation between, but nevertheless,

I guess it would have been pretty cold in the winter,

hot in summer.

Imagine the life in here.

Crowded...

..the smells,

some cooking there,

but also I guess a little kitchen somewhere outside

along with a privy.

Life must have been very intense.

Kathe, what does it feel like to be here?

Hmm...

I find that when I bring groups here, you'll oftentimes find...

..one or two people who just journey off on their own

and you may find them standing on a porch or beside a tree

and they're crying.

Just sometimes very emotionally crying.

You can almost...

hear the children.

I can see people sometimes standing on the porch.

I can see people coming down this lane from the fields in the evening,

very, very tired.

And if you're just quiet and just listen,

you can hear it, and feel it, the spirit of my ancestors all around this place.

It's incredibly moving and important that the grand mansion house

and the humble slave quarters survive on the same plantation.

This beautiful architecture is not tainted by slavery,

but is part of the same narrative.

The slave quarters here are, I suppose, to some,

an embarrassing survival, but that's a good thing.

Forgetfulness is the great enemy.

While slave quarters like that survive, people are reminded of

the evil that comes when man has power over man, the evil of exploitation,

the evil of domination, and while that memory survives,

those evils, one hopes, can be eradicated.

Istanbul.

The ancient home of the Ottoman Sultans.

This was the capital of their mighty empire from the 15th century

and the place where their dynasty thrived for over 400 years.

I've come to Istanbul to explore an institution in the former Ottoman court

that for centuries has been reviled and misunderstood

by people in the West.

It was a place, it is said, in which men had absolute power over women.

It's the harem of the Sultans.

The harem is a labyrinth of nearly 400 rooms,

many of which have still never been seen by the public.

This is the architecture of a hidden and secret world

that is still largely written out of Turkish history.

I've now entered the harem.

This gate was guarded by black eunuchs.

They'd be sitting in this room on these benches,

stopping people like me proceeding beyond this point.

The life story of the eunuchs was peculiar indeed.

They were slaves mostly purchased as boys in North Africa and Egypt

and then castrated en route back to Istanbul.

Brutal indeed.

The eunuchs lived in the rooms here,

they guarded the Sultan's harem of beautiful women.

Imagine the atmosphere, the veiled fury, the frustration.

The harem was enlarged by Sultan Murad III in the late 16th century.

Estimates vary, but it's thought that between

400 and 1,000 women were living within these walls during his reign.

Most of the girls were slaves purchased at slave markets,

captured in war, or simply presented as gifts.

And since Islamic law forbade the enslavement of Muslims,

virtually all the girls here had been born Christians or were Jewish,

and this is where the new arrivals lived.

The girls were virgins when they arrived here, generally not more than 12 years old

and immediately converted to Islam and then harem-trained.

Taught useful skills: music, embroidery, Turkish,

and they slept in dormitories up here,

overseen at night by an elderly lady to ensure there'd be no Sapphic activity.

Sex was strictly controlled in the harem.

A rigid hierarchy was in place.

Only the most accomplished and beautiful girls would be chosen to spend the night with the Sultan

and these favourites would often be hand-picked by the Sultan's own mother.

When chosen, a girl's life would be transformed.

After Murad had slept with a girl,

her status increased literally overnight.

After all, she could be carrying a child that would be the next Sultan.

The girl was moved here, into the favourites' courtyard,

given her own apartment and staff, her own eunuch.

I suppose most girls in the harem wanted to be selected as favourites,

were furious if not chosen, and were jealous of those who were.

Murad is said to have fathered nearly 50 children.

All the males were instantly considered potential heirs to the throne.

This fostered a savagely competitive atmosphere amongst the mothers,

as they promoted the interests of their own children.

The harem was a hotbed of intrigue,

only the cunning and manipulative could succeed here, could rise to the top.

Women would spy on women,

women would spy on the council of state if they could,

on the Sultan himself,

through that window there, that grille, this is the council hall.

Eunuchs would be bribed.

In this world there were no boundaries,

this world of subtle intrigue, anything was possible.

Murders were undertaken, even the Sultan himself could be toppled.

When a sultan died or was deposed,

it was a terrifying moment for the inhabitants of the harem

as favourites were replaced and the battle for the succession began amongst the sons.

Murad, when he became sultan, had all his brothers executed

so that none of them could challenge his possession of the throne.

This bloody solution was typical of Ottoman rulers in the 16th century.

In the 17th century this rather extreme approach

to solving the tricky problems of succession was gradually rejected.

The Sultans preferred to keep their brothers in protective custody

and these rooms are where these chaps whiled away their time.

Gorgeous interiors, very much gilded cages within the heart of the harem.

The woman whose son survived family struggles and fratricide to become Sultan

would herself become the most powerful woman in the harem,

indeed one of the most powerful women in the Muslim world.

She became the Valide Sultan, the Queen Mother,

and this is her apartment, an amazing place.

You can feel here the privilege,

the prestige that went with her position.

This apartment, this amazing place is set at the very heart of the harem.

From here she could see and control everything.

Golly, this is the private part of the apartment,

this is where the Queen Mother would sleep.

The bed over there, and here is her prayer room

and on the wall is Mecca.

Golly, and she would pray here, facing Mecca.

The Queen Mother and her son, the Sultan, ruled the empire from this harem.

It is ironic that the sons born here could become heads of the greatest Islamic dynasty on earth

and yet their mothers had almost invariably been slaves

and had been born non-Muslims.

Power was achieved and maintained at tremendous human cost.

It's true that slaves within the harem were educated

and they could rise to high positions of power in the land

but you have to remember that within its walls,

girls were enslaved and trained to be put at the disposal of one man,

and those girls were guarded by male slaves who'd been castrated.

And also within the harem there was a tradition of brother murdering brother.

So although the harem is a fascinating and efficient machine of state,

it was surely, in the end, a deadly and terrifying place.

This is the steppe of central Asia,

the vast and snowy plains of Kazakhstan.

This is a country with little architectural history.

The people have a nomadic tradition.

But it's here that the first new capital city of the 21st century is being created.

This is a country starting from an almost blank slate.

What kind of city will they create?

The city authorities have organised this pageant for me.

It displays traditional Kazakh culture.

These chaps are fighting for the body of a dead sheep,

and one side will get it and carry it and score a goal.

In the background is the image of the city.

And that is the strange thing,

the fusion between tradition here, on this playing field,

with modernity marching towards us, the fusion of the two worlds.

The marriage!

This is Astana, a name that simply means "capital".

Kazakhstan only became independent in 1991,

after the fall of the Soviet Union.

And fuelled by oil riches, this young nation is creating

a space-age capital to show that it's a force to be reckoned with.

It's astonishing and very exciting to see a capital city arising before one's very eyes.

In the central area here, it's very much a construction site,

a work in progress, but things are going ahead at some speed.

Also, historically, it's very rare to see a city that's the vision of one man.

But this city, one man's vision, one man's dream, is being realised all around me in steel and concrete.

Astana is being forged by President Nazarbayev -

an authoritarian ruler who has led the nation since its creation.

In the last election, he received an implausible 91% of votes.

But while there is oil wealth and stability,

Nazarbayev remains popular,

despite his decision to move the capital to this remote location.

The emerging city centre feels like a ghost town.

But one key building is calculated to attract the people.

In front of me is a mighty tower that marks the symbolic heart of the city.

It represents the tree of life, the Baiterek,

connecting the earth to the heavens.

It's 97 metres high, because it was in 1997

that Astana was declared the capital of the nation.

On top is a huge golden globe.

That refers to a Kazakh myth of the Samruk bird,

which each year lays a mighty golden egg

which marks the coming of spring, and symbolises the sun.

Within this great orb, this rather powerful symbol of the sun,

is an unusual image, a representation, I suppose, of the President.

And here it is.

It's his hand, his hand imprint.

He invites all who come to the city to put their hand in his,

to join with him.

I'll have a go. It's a rather large mitt he's got.

KAZAKH NATIONAL ANTHEM PLAYS

The national anthem is played.

One stands here, thinking of the great leader,

looking at his palace right in front of me.

ANTHEM FINISHES

Charming.

What's strange of course is that this is an unusual cult of the personality,

because one walks around the city, and his name, his power, really,

is imprinted in everything, but there are no images of him,

except here.

This is the one moment on one's journey through his city

that one actually meets the man.

The President's will is absolute.

Kazakhstan is to be represented by modern and monumental architecture.

Money is no object, especially when it comes to his own residence.

And here's the President's palace,

standing in autocratic isolation,

yet commanding the centre of the city.

I guess its dominating position

and its rather grandiose classical style of architecture

can be read as a portrait of the man, central to affairs,

utterly in command, the head of state in every way conceivable.

The audacity of Nazarbayev's vision culminates in the most mysterious sight of all,

a pyramid surrounded not by sand, but snow.

This is the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation...

a monument to the artistic and spiritual life of Kazakhstan,

designed by British architect Norman Foster.

All of the President's hopes for his nation are vested here,

a showpiece for the reinvention of Kazakhstan.

This is very much a pyramid of the 21st century.

It's made of modern materials, and is a pioneering piece of structural engineering.

Egyptian pyramids are things of mystery.

What secrets can this pyramid hold?

Wow, a dark, a black interior.

Something you don't see every day.

It's astonishing, cavernous, cave-like.

Very elemental.

To find out what the story is, I'll start at the bottom.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS

Good heavens, a theatre in the bowels of the building.

Not a tomb chamber as in Egyptian pyramids, but a living, vibrant opera house.

ALL SING

Of course, an opera house -

the universal symbol that you've arrived.

The essential component of any capital city with cultural aspirations.

It's an amazing space, this, subterranean,

but above me, presiding over all, is a gigantic image of the sun.

I now rise up the pyramid, towards the heavens.

It's intended to symbolise the journey of the Kazakh nation,

emerging from the shadows into a glorious new age.

I've ascended back into the light.

I'm now in a fantastic minimal, soaring space.

I'm at the very heart of the pyramid.

Below me is the opera house.

I'm standing on top of its sun,

and above me is the apex of the pyramid, my journey's end.

The building reaches a climax with a dramatic explosion of light,

as you enter paradise.

There's another dazzling sun overhead, and dotted around are the images of doves of peace.

This is where the President meets to discuss spiritual matters.

And now I think I'm beginning to understand the purpose,

the meaning, of this strange and exotic structure.

The President is, in effect, the new sun god,

the man from whom all glory, all power, all light,

emanates in his land.

And here he sits at the top of his pyramid,

contemplating his creation, his city, his dream.

The architecture here speaks of power yet to come.

On my last night in Astana, I try the national dishes of Kazakhstan,

sheep's head and horse meat.

The survival food of nomads transformed into an expensive delicacy.

Horse I'm intrigued to taste.

Oh, gosh!

Wow!

Very pungent.

Very, very, very strong taste.

A taste you have to acquire through years of perseverance.

Here's something very special.

God! Amazing.

This is horse's milk.

It's like rancid yoghurt.

Interesting, actually.

Memorable.

Astana is all about this clash between tradition and modernity.

A home for a nomadic people packaged as a modern, thrusting metropolis.

It's the expression of the power of one man,

but although displays of power can be oppressive they can also produce architecture of high quality.

History teaches that something ugly can create something beautiful.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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