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Sat, Apr 12, 2008
Historian and writer Dan Cruickshank celebrates architecture as a creative force as he explores the world's greatest cities, buildings and monuments. In the first episode, Cruickshank explores how humanity has created beauty through architecture. He travels to Greenland to build an igloo, creating an architectural form that is under threat due to climate change. In China he scales the world's biggest Buddha and deciphers a temple in India rich with erotic images. He visits the Catherine Palace, a hot-blooded baroque masterpiece in the middle of snowy Russia. Finally, he uncovers the dark tale of Albi Cathedral, a building originally designed to suppress the local population but now an object of beauty and wonder.
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Thu, Sep 11, 2008
Dan Cruickshank visits and explains the relevance of death to several architectural masterpieces: a chapel decorated with human bones in Sedlec, Chzechia; the Mayan temples like Yaxha (now in Guatemala), where the sacrifice of blood, carrier of life force, was central the religion devoted to the natural cycle of life; Staglieno cemetery in Genoa, Europe's largest cemetery; and the complex, central position of tombs in the Ancient culture of Pharaonic Egypt.
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Thu, Sep 18, 2008
Dan Cruickshank visits major works of architectural art which represent paradise on earth, including a hanging Taoist temple in the Chinese mountains where one feels in total harmony with nature, the self-sufficient, secluded orthodox Sinai monastery in the Sinai desert, the Ottoman Suleiman mosque which represents the gates to paradise and the concentric design of the Tamil Hindu holy city Sri Ranganthaswamy, where everything is fitted for the cult practices, both daily and during the great annual festival when the normally well-hidden holiest is shown even to the infidels in a grand procession.
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Thu, Sep 25, 2008
Dan explores architectural heritage gravely affected by the ravages of war and natural disasters. In Dresden, the 'Florence at the Elbe', a uniquely consistent Baroque city, the 1945 allied air raid laid waste to 75% in order to undermine the German war spirit, in part restored after the German reunification, including the masterpiece Frauenkirche (Our Lady church). Palmyra, a silk route city in the Syrian desert, was destroyed and abandoned after emperor Aurelian's legions repressed a foolish declaration of independence by queen Zenobia, who even invaded neighboring Roman provinces. San Francisco was virtually wiped away by the 1906 massive earthquake, yet people hardly worry that the next one will probably happen in the next decades, only some (re)building uses more resistant techniques. It's quite an adventure in civil war-ravaged Afganistan (2008) to visit the lonely Jam minaret (1109, near Herat in the West), last monumental remnant of the once mighty Ghurid empire.
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Wed, Apr 30, 2008
Dan examines how architecture is designed to bring people together. The 1960 completed new federal capital Brazilia, in Central Brazil, was the largest urbanism continuous project ever, designed by Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer in an attempt to create a new society. The Syrian capital Damascus in the world's oldest continuously inhabited city, still centered on the Roman Age commercial axis. It retains various monuments in consecutive styles, such as Christian churches, Musim mosques, an Ottoman 'chan' (caravan 'serail', i.e. resting station) on the Silk route, adapting to political history able to cohabit with many different ethno-linguistic and religious communities, joined by shared cultural traditions such as story telling. The modernist high-rise US metropolis New York City is the Western world's largest, richest melting pot. Dan focuses on his favorite skyscraper there, the huge, integrated multi functional (mainly offices) Rockefeller Center, ten buildings on 24 acres started in 1931. Dharavi, in the Indian commercial and industrial metropolis Mumbai (Bombay), is Asia's largest slum (600,000 inhabitants), testifies to the spontaneously improvised 'architectural' building of a dynamic socio-economic network among the poor ex-rural immigrants since the 1930s from Indian regional and cultural origins, practically neglected by the authorities.
Thu, Oct 9, 2008
Dan visits architectural expressions of power. Ceausescu's Palace of the People was a megalomaniac testimony to the last European Communist dictatorship, for which half of the capital was destroyed so it could have an immense axis-view. After the party's downfall, it ironically houses parliament, the embodiment of a democratic alternative. The 'impregnable' crusader castle of Marqab is an impressive example of mainly military might, built and held by the military order knights. It was part of a series of fortifications designed to stem the Muslim tide of Saladdin's triumphant armies, who nevertheless overran the crusader state. Istanbul's Ottoman sultan's harem, the seraglio, is frequently seen in the West as the Oriental ultimate brothel, but was rather a matter of demonstrating the immensely wealthy sultan's prestige, housing not just his hundreds (or up to a few thousand) concubines (Islam allows only four wives, so they were recruited as infidel slaves from the provinces, then converted) but most importantly their sons, the pretenders to the throne of the Turkish empire, hence a battlefield of intrigue for power for the successor and his mother, who would become as sultan-valide a force to be reckoned with behind his throne. Evergreen estate New Orleans embodies the North American, notably Dixie, culture of slaveholders, a grand home in neo-Greek style (stands for the combination of democracy and slavery) and miserable wooden shacks for the chattel black 'bests of burden'.
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Thu, Oct 16, 2008
Dan visits places where architecture embodies or evokes dreams or nightmares. The walled city, Shibam, in Yemen, the relatively fertile south of the Arabian peninsula, has the world's oldest high-rise, each tower build and constantly maintained for one family in Ancient-traditional mud bricks. In the Dominican Republic, half of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, lies the first Conquistador city. It was founded to embody the dream of a new Spanish empire and is now the capital Santo Domingo, which preserves the vast oldest American cathedral, in Plateresque (inspired by Spanish silver plates) style with a Gothic interior, from which spreads the renaissance-revival of the Ancient rational rectangular blocks grid adopted throughout the continent. The viceregal palace Alcazar de Colon embodies the contrast between great wealth and enslaving of Indians, as they died -mainly from epidemics- replaced by African slaves import, resulting in the Antillean ethno-cultural melting pot. Philadelphia on the US East Coast was the site of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, yet its most impressive building is the Eastern State Penitentiary, opened in 1829 to rid Pennsylvanian society of crime by Quaker reeducation of convicts instead of the traditional abusive regime. This building, now a picturesque ruin, a grim reminder of solitary confinement where manual labor was carried out in virtual darkness, and according to Dickens, worse then beatings. Its star-shaped layout was copied worldwide. In Thimpu, the small capital of the Budhist Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the Trashi Choe Song, 'fortress of glorious religion', seat of a monastery, monarchy and government, embodies the king's policy to maintain traditional values in architecture -preserved and new- dress code etc., combined with some innovations such as TV.
Wed, May 21, 2008
Historian and writer Dan Cruickshank celebrates architecture as a creative force as he explores the world's greatest cities, buildings and monuments. Dan explores how architecture gives us pleasure, visiting the luxurious Taj hotel in India, a fantasy castle in Germany, and the hedonist surrounds of an ancient Pompeii brothel. Finally, Dan explores the Villa Barbaro, one of the world's most beautiful country houses where pleasure was deemed to be created by perfect architecture.