Adventures in Architecture

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.

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 Sanimuinag,

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 50.

-Fifty? -Yeah, 50.

5-0, 507

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

So, right, I'll take...

Fifty!

Good Lord.

Right.

London seems sweet at this moment.

Does it matter where we put the first block?

Yeah.

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. -Dogs.

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? -Yeah.

Can I see?

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.

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...

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.

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.