Dan Cruickshank’s Adventures in Architecture: Death
A bit of a delay on this one, as the iPlayer stream didn’t appear for a good couple of hours after broadcast yesterday.
If you can cope with an hour of Dan Cruickshank’s oooh-gosh-blimey-cripes presenting style - truly, he is what Molesworth would have grown up to be - this second programme in his culture and architecture series is a macabre little gem.
Ruin-bibbing at its best, Dan bounces round the globe looking at the architecture of death - from the temple of Hatshepsut (who, despite being a queen was always shown as a bloke with a beard… you can add your own joke here) to cremation sites on the banks of the Ganges.
The jaw dropping bit is a visit to the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic. Fourty thousand skeletons, arranged by a mad genius of a woodcarver in to coats of arms, chandeliers and… oh, just watch it for the bit where the bloke hoovers a skull.
As Dan would say, golly! Amazing!
I really like the random collision of kooky eccentric architectural historian Banham and golly gosh eccentric architectural historian Cruickshank. They don’t have much else in common, I suppose. Both great communicators, though…