Around the World in 80 Treasures (2005) s01e02 Episode Script

l'm embarking on the second leg of my world tour
of 80 of the greatest treasures
ever created by man.
l'm about to travel through
two thousand years of history,
from the ancient civilisations of Mexico
to the promised land of the United States.
lt's ajourney which will take me from
mysterious pyramids and lost cities
to the skyscrapers of New York.
l've been on the road for two and a half weeks.
Leaving behind South America,
l fly from Brazil to the
southern Mexican state of Chiapas.
l'm in the rainforest of southern Mexico,
and it's here that civilisation started
to emerge, three thousand years ago.
l'm searching for a treasure created by
this most bloodthirsty of civilisations.
Ah, now here's a clue.
Ancient structure.
l'm obviously heading in the right direction.
For centuries this dense forest
concealed a shocking and grisly secret:
a lost city in which human sacrifice
was a way of life.
Palenque - the great city of the Mayans,
built in the hundred years after 650 AD,
by King Pacal and his sons.
What a fantastic commanding site.
There's the plain over there - from the city.
The king, his warriors,
could watch what's going on.
What we're seeing here
is the sacred heart of the city.
The temples and the palace.
Palenque is one of the world's
most remarkable ancient cities.
lt reveals so much about the Mayan civilisation,
which dates back to a thousand BC or earlier.
The Mayans ruled a vast empire,
stretching through Central America
from Mexico to Guatemala and Honduras.
The buildings at Palenque are adorned
with reliefs an hieroglyphs
which unlock the door
to a sophisticated yet savage world.
The Mayans evolved a calendar
and were great astrologers,
and are best known for
practising human sacrifice.
At the heart of this violent and bloody world
was King Pacal's palace.
lt was built high on a hill
to make it easy to defend.
lts thick stone walls
were designed to withstand attack.
Wars between rival kingdoms were ritualistic and
governed by the movement of the planet Venus,
so were known as 'star wars'.
This must have been a very
important courtyard in the palace.
This is where subjects came to pay
homage to the king, to bring tribute.
They'd have walked through here and
they'd have passed these huge images of captives,
naked figures - of warriors taken in war,
people who had been humiliated.
These were a warning to the subjects
coming through to pay homage.
These men had frightfully miserable faces.
Even the dead,
naked which is a sign of humiliation
in this culture.
And this figure at the end is strange -
looking upwards towards
perhaps where the king would be.
Naked and with, again this gigantic penis.
l wonder why.
l do know that part of the
ritual of sacrificing a captive
was often to mutilate, to cause pain, to,
l suppose,
prove the warrior was worthy of sacrifice.
He wasn't meant to show
the agony he was - put through.
And l suppose this could be a part of that
ritual, the scarring of the penis. Astonishing.
Blood sacrifice was at the core
of the Mayan way of life.
This is an altar,
and some people believe this is where
the Maya sacrificed captives taken in war.
These unfortunate chaps
would have their heads cut off,
or more disturbing, their heart plucked out,
and while the heart still pumped the blood
would be smeared over the gods kept in the temple,
and then the body skinned and the skin
draped over the priests, would dance around.
Very hard for us to take all this,
but of course, you have to remember,
the Maya didn't hold life cheaply.
They valued it greatly,
that's the point.
lt was so precious, it was the most
precious thing to give to the gods.
Some mutilated captives would
be dragged up the steep steps
of the temple of the inscriptions
to face further humiliation and aony at the top.
But blood letting was not restricted to enemies.
After victory in battle,
King Pacal himself would pierce his penis
and let it bleed on the altar to thank the gods,
while the queen slit open her tongue.
l'm descending into the bowels of the pyramid,
into the Mayan underworld.
Very steep steps.
Above me, is a spectacular system -
of vaults for which the Mayans - are famous.
These cauldron vaults, incredible structures.
The amazing thing is,
all of this structure and what's below
was lost for nearly 1500 years, buried.
Although l'm deep underground - well,
deep in the pyramid - it's incredibly hot.
And these stairs are really treacherous.
They're now running with water condensation
and l've got to be very careful
not to tumble down
and maybe never come back again.
Mmm, my goodness me, they are slippery.
Here's a massive slab acting as a door,
sealing a tomb.
And inside, here it is,
the massive stone sarcophagus of King Pacal.
And what we see is the lid
suspended on steel girders now.
Originally, it would have - have sat
right down there on the sarcophagus itself -
- in which is this moon-shaped opening
which received the king's body.
So here we see a piece of the art as the
Mayan people themselves would have seen it,
preserved for all those years. lncredible.
One sees in the middle the king himself.
Now - he died at the age of eighty,
but here you see him as a vigorous young man.
He's lying on his back,
he's falling down into the mouth,
the jaws of death,
represented by the great jaguar god,
the god of the underworld - the god of death.
That's below the king; above him - rises this
- this great tree - the tree of life.
But in the form of a cross. The cross was
a sacred symbol for the Mayan people.
Fascinating. lt represented the connection
between the underworld, where l am now,
the heavens above, and the land of the living -
- whose blood was, in a way, the most powerful
sacred element of this - of this world.
Because the whole image here is to do with
life coming from death, that's the point.
The great cycle of existence,
as the seasons come and as night follows day
and the sun returns in the morning,
this is declaring that
through death comes rebirth.
Yet the Mayan way of life did die,
in around 900 AD.
Exactly why is a mystery.
The best guess is
a combination of famine and war.
l leave Palenque with a yearning
to find out more about
the enigmatic civilisations of Central America.
So l head to Central Mexico,
to a place which has been
compared to ancient Egypt.
The city of Teotihuacan is larger
and older than Palenque,
but lacks its atmosphere
and has been over-restored.
lt's not one of my treasures,
but you can't deny its scale and power.
The origins of -
Teotihuacan are surrounded in mystery.
lt may date from as early as 200 BC -
- and the great creators of the city
may have been the enigmatic Toltecs.
At its peak,
it was one of the world's largest cities,
with a population of 125,000 people.
lt covers an area of up to eight square miles.
The Temple of the Sun is the
third largest pyramid in the world,
after one at Cholula in Mexico
and great pyramid in Egypt.
Phew. Some climb. 63 metres probably.
More like 70 originally,
with a temple at the top.
An amazing achievement.
lncredible view here.
There's the Way of the Dead, the great street,
leading the temples each side to
the Temple of the Moon over there.
Until recently nobody knew exactly why
these pyramids were built.
Then archaeologists excavating
the Temple of the Moon
discovered a dozen skeletons,
ten of whom had been ritually decapitated.
So like Palenque,
this was once the scene of human sacrifice.
To find my treasure,
l must follow in the footsteps of the Toltecs,
who in 750 AD mysteriously abandoned Teotihuacan
and built a new capital at Tollan Tula.
Just a few ruins of this once-great city survive.
But these include four mighty warriors.
Here, one of the great,
most moving memorials to the Toltec people.
These great statues were
only discovered in the 1940s,
buried in a trench.
They date from about 900 AD,
and they're thought to be columns
supporting a temple on top of a flat pyramid.
The details suggest that they were -
representing warriors - or guardian spirits.
Warriors because that is the
feathered headdress of a warrior,
and they're holding bows, arrows and spears.
The god they were guarding is revealed,
suggested anyway, by some of the details.
The stylised butterfly up there -
- and below - the feet have feathers.
These are emblems of the
great god of the Toltecs.
And on the rear of this great warrior
or guardian is this solar disk.
Here it is. ln the centre,
a face - the sun god.
And here, carvings.
You can speculate - this might be writing.
No one's deciphered it.
Also there's evidence here of colour.
There's red here.
All four of these great giants -
originally would have been brightly coloured.
The giants give a hint ofjust how splendid
the city of Tollan Tula must have been.
The later Aztec people told
of incredible Toltec treasures.
These have long since disappeared,
but a series of carvings gives
an insight into their sinister beliefs.
l'm in the temple area
at the base of the pyramid -
- and there are amazing images on the wall.
Jaguars, ferocious heads.
Over there, rattlesnakes devouring -
human beings.
Skulls. Amazing.
But the mighty - Toltec empire disappeared
in rather mysterious circumstances
in the late 12th century.
lt is said that its great king-priest was exiled.
He was associated with the great god
Quetzalcoatl, the god of the Toltecs.
This god had a white face and a grey beard,
always shown as that.
And it was said that one day he would return
from the east to repossess this land.
This god, of course, did return,
but not quite as expected.
A man did come from the east,
white face, grey beard.
He was Cortez.
Cortez was a Spanish conqueror
who arrived in 1519.
By this time, the Aztecs were ruling Mexico.
Their emperor, Montezuma,
mistook Cortez for Quetzalcoatl
and welcomed him as a saviour.
This proved to be the downfall
of Aztec civilisation.
The ancient culture of Central America
was mercilessly destroyed.
The Spaniards laid waste to Aztec cities,
looted their treasures
and slaughtered the population.
My journey now takes me to Mexico City,
a sprawling metropolis of 22 million people.
lt's here that the Spanish conquerors
built their capital,
on the site of a great Aztec city.
Mexico finally gained independence
from Spain in 1821,
leaving the Catholic Church and
a succession of dictators and emperors
to fight for the soul of the nation.
ln the 1920s,
Mexico enjoyed a great renaissance in the arts,
fired by the idealism of the political Left.
From this was born my next treasure,
the first painting on my journey.
However, its story doesn't start here,
but thousands of miles away.
lt's the story of two men who embody
one of the great struggles of the 20th century,
between Capitalism and Communism.
ln 1933, the American tycoon Nelson Rockefeller
commissioned the leftwing
Mexican artist Diego Rivera
to paint a huge mural for his
flagship office block in New York City.
Rockefeller was so much offended by the content
of the painting that he had it destroyed.
But that wasn't the end of the story.
The artist made sure of that.
Rivera wanted to bring his
murdered mural back to life,
and he achieved it here,
in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.
This was painted in 1934.
And this version - is called Man,
Controller of the Universe.
And we see in the centre of the picture,
man, the worker,
using modern technology to look into the future,
to control the future,
to select the world in which he wants to live.
The painting - tells another story,
is divided in half.
lt's the conflict of two world visions,
the conflict between - Communism and Capitalism.
Here on the left, between the wings,
one sees a nightclub scene, a speakeasy.
Men and women drinking martinis, l think.
Obviously this is the decadence of capitalism.
There's a lovely little
portrait here of Rockefeller.
Then there's a strange image indeed.
The great sort of Roman or Greek statue
looking down rather threateningly,
and round its neck a crucifix.
This is a - a cry - for - for - for the -
for the indigenous peoples of this land
and their ancient religions and culture.
And he obviously sees the church
as a tool in the hands of the capitalists
to oppress and suppress the spirit
and the nature of the people,
the true ancient people of this land.
Then in the centre a scene again from New York.
Police attacking workers.
And there's police on horses with batons
thumping on their heads.
A scene of skyscrapers.
Amazing image. Over here, though,
we see the artist's ideal universe.
This half of the painting is dedicated to the -
the beauties, the benefits of Communism.
We see there one of the great powers
of early Communism, Lenin,
holding hands with the workers.
At the top, workers marching together.
Below them, the red flag being
held by Marx and Trotsky.
Trotsky a man that came to Mexico
and that Rivera knew in the late 1930s.
So there we are an incredible powerful image
of how things ought to be.
But of course reflecting back
with the perspective of history,
it has a certain sadness indeed absurdity really.
The whole vision offered up here has crumbled,
and the evil world of Capitalism, which the
artist here is doing his best to destroy,
has flourished and gained new strength.
ln a way, it's a sad document
to a great aspiration not realised,
partly because of the weakness of the politicians
who had the world in their hands,
and also sad because the artist himself
proved to be a lesser man
than the painting proclaims.
Rivera's politics may have been socialist,
but his way of life wasn't.
He was intoxicated
by the glamour of high living.
l wonder what Rivera
would make of modern Mexico,
where Capitalism has triumphed.
He'd probably feel very much at home.
When l go for supper in the Plaza Garibaldi,
l'm immediately pounced
on by dozens of mariachi singers.
Tonight l'm going to be serenaded,
whether l like it or not.
My ears take a battering
from this strange cacophony.
l've been on the road for almost three weeks
and it's beginning to take its toll.
The following day l head for another country,
the most powerful on earth.
The flight across the stunning landscape
of the south-western United States
brings much-needed calm and respite.
The USA is a wonderfully curious creation.
ln little more than two centuries,
this great melting pot of people
has achieved a powerful sense of identity
and grown to world domination.
ln my short time here,
l hope to dig beneath the surface
and through my treasures learn more
about the way the United States,
the land of the free, views itself.
My first treasure here is sure to offend
some people, but it's arguably the single object
which best defines the United States.
lt's a dark, indeed a deadly treasure,
that enabled white Europeans to express
their conviction
that it was their manifest destiny
to possess this land,
and in the process suppress
its indigenous peoples.
To find it, l've come to Cortez in Colorado.
l have an appointment with Dale,
alias William D. Foot
of the Windy Gap Regulators Gun Club.
Hi.
- How you doing?
- Very well. And
- Pleased to meet you.
- Nice to meet you, Dale.
Here's my treasure. The 1851 colt revolver.
The 1851 Navy Colt revolutionised gun design
and helped change the world.
The Colt has a - a terrific beauty.
A violent beauty, l suppose.
There isn't another gun like them.
lt was the most popular of all of the hand guns
during the Civil War.
And then after the Civil War a lot of
the soldiers were able to keep their weapons,
and they moved west with them
and these guns made the journey west
and were a - a big part in taming
the western frontier.
lnteresting, of course, in - in American history,
the gun has this very powerful role.
Almost as if - it's almost a symbol of -
of freedom and independence,
going of course back to the Second Amendment,
l suppose.
Every citizen has a right to bear arms
to protect the freedom of their country.
And of course that is very much
an issue today, isn't it?
So it's still very pertinent,
there's a debate about the right to bear arms
- and the meaning of - of guns and all that.
- Oh yes.
What do you reckon guns mean now?
ln this - in this land?
There's - there's several different sayings
about firearms and freedom.
An armed man is a free man,
an unarmed man's a slave.
And that's kind of the philosophy of people
in this country for the most part, l think.
We - we tend to appreciate our guns.
We don't - we don't want to misuse them.
We don't - we don't go around
shooting everyone we see,
but we have the right to defend ourselves
and to protect our home and our families.
And guns are an integral part of that.
So Samuel Colt came up with the idea,
invented the six shot cylinder.
- The revolver, right.
- Yeah, revolver. Six shots in -
you know, without having to reload made it
possible to do a lot of damage to an enemy.
Oh definitely, yeah.
lt's a pioneering mass produced object
with components which one could -
- l suppose damaged components could be replaced,
or indeed - Exactly.
A new cylinder dropped in.
lt has a extraordinary
functional engineered beauty,
which also in some extraordinary way
absolutely expresses its rather lethal power.
- Do you love them?
- Oh yes. Yeah.
The 1851 is my favourite
of all the cap and ball revolvers.
So - so have you - these - these are -
are component objects,
very much pieces of pioneering
19th century industrial design.
- Right, easy to take apart.
- Remove this pin.
- The pin's the key, isn't it?
- lt's called the wedge, by the way.
- The wedge.
- That's right. That's right.
Slide the barrel assembly off.
Slide the cylinder out.
And those are your three main components.
Each object in itself is this pure industrial
design of the highest order.
Just a very classic, classic pistol.
- Do you think you want to fire one of these?
- l think l do. All right.
My finger on the trigger,
get into a position which feels comfortable.
l'm going to squeeze it now.
Good shot.
- Thank you.
- You got it.
When you cock this time,
just turn it sideways as you cock,
to keep that fired cap from falling down
and blocking the cylinder motion.
Yes, l'm with you.
So l put my finger on the trigger.
- Squeeze it.
- Oh right.
lt's a good smell, black powder.
- l love the smoke and smell.
- l love the smell
of powder in the afternoon.
Keep your hand on your gun,
don't you trust anyone.
There's just one kind of man that you can trust,
that's a dead man, or a gringo like me.
All right.
- Good job.
- That was very enjoyable. Thank you.
l leave Dale feeling very uneasy.
The Navy Colt is a fine and pioneering machine,
yet l feel guilty for admiring it
because of its role in winning the west
for the white man
and destroying the native American way of life.
l've always been fascinated
by the early history of North America,
so for my next treasure l stay in Colorado
but step back in time.
Deep in the canyons of the Rocky Mountains
lies the most important
ancient site in the United States.
lts very existence is a riddle.
lt was created by mysterious people
who disappeared
without trace long before Europeans
set foot on the Americas.
When it was discovered
by two cowboys a century ago,
Mesa Verde rewrote the history of the west.
lt showed that native Americans
in this region had lived in well-built,
organised and permanent urban communities.
Within Mesa Verde are concealed the remains
of a mysterious people
who flourished here about a thousand years ago.
So little is known about them beyond the fact
that they were great builders.
They constructed for themselves
essentially urban communities.
And what one gets here is this incredible sense
of their at-oneness,
l suppose, with the world in which they live.
This organic building.
So who were these remarkable people?
The answer is, we really don't know.
Sometimes they're called the Anasazi,
but that's simply the Navajo name
for 'the ancient ones'.
The fact is, they've disappeared from history,
leaving behind this haunting imagery,
these beautifully constructed buildings.
Little is known about
the spiritual beliefs of the Anasazi.
What we do know has been gleaned
from intriguing underground
ruins known as kivas.
Most have now lost their roofs.
Ah now, this is a very good example of a kiva.
A circular subterranean room,
where the family would gather as if for prayers,
to tell tales.
And on the floor are two holes.
The bigger hole, fireplace.
The smaller hole is a (sipapu)
That is, a symbolic connection
to the underworld, to their place of origin.
They're returning to their place of creation,
into the womb.
This small town, known as Cliff Palace,
has 23 kivas,
about 220 rooms,
and was home to around 250 people.
Here clearly is the front door.
A step.
Set of steps going up.
A small tapering entrance through
which these people would have passed.
See if l can get in here.
l suppose this is the right approach.
Leg over. Ah, yes.
Oh.
Astonishing.
This is where a family, l suppose,
would have lived, slept after a hard day's toil
in the fields above on the mesa.
They'd come down here.
Another door.
Ah!
Good god. Absolutely amazing.
Up here there are wall paintings.
lf these people are, as some people think,
Toltecs who came up here
from Central America
and then went back they'd have seen,
they'd have remembered,
these great pyramidal structures
would have been part of their landscape,
their experience from centuries past.
lncredible.
Being in here, one connects so directly
with this mysterious and lost people.
ln the days of the Anasazi,
the only way to reach the fields on top
was by climbing the steep cliffs using footholds
cut in the rock.
They must have had the agility
of mountain goats.
l soon give up and resort to ladders,
which are treacherous enough.
As l explore,
it soon becomes clear that Cliff Palace,
one of many small communities
and homesteads built into the Rockies.
l can't help reflecting on the fate
of the indigenous peoples
of the Americas stretching
back thousands of years.
They were very sophisticated and very admirable,
particularly in their relationship with nature.
They respected the world in which they lived.
They recycled.
They worked with nature, not against it.
They didn't obliterate the environment.
We can learn from this.
From one of America's earliest-known towns,
l travel 1700 miles
to the most powerful place on earth.
Washington DC
is the home of United States democracy,
and the capital of the world
in everything but name.
The United States proclaims high ideals
of equality, liberty and justice,
but can be overbearing
in the pursuit of its goals.
ln Washington's imposing neoclassical builders,
power brokers deliberate
over the fate of nations.
But none of these, not even the White House,
is my treasure.
lnstead l've chosen a building which is,
in my view,
a much more potent symbol
of nationhood and independence.
lt lies about a hundred miles
south-west of Washington,
in the small Virginian town of Charlottesville.
Monticello was designed
and built in the late 18th century
by America's third president and
one its most revered founding fathers,
Thomas Jefferson.
He drafted the Declaration of lndependence,
which proclaimed that all men are equal
and laid down man's right to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
His home is not huge,
but it reveals more about the early history of
the United States than any other building.
Monticello's a declaration of independence,
American independence, in bricks and mortar.
lt's an affirmation of national identity,
a symbol for the new nation.
Thomas Jefferson wanted to
create a new architecture for this new land,
an architecture which summed up
the aspirations of the people.
And he did this by fusing
different architectures -
ltalian Renaissance architecture -
- English 18th century architecture,
and above all,
French 18th century architecture.
All these architectural styles were classical,
and in the late 18th century
classicism has a very particular meaning.
ln newly-born republican France,
it had come to stand for revolution
and the ideals of equality,
liberty and fraternity.
Those great inspirational moments when people
are free of the tyranny of kings and princes,
free to express themselves as individuals,
and that is what this building
is meant to represent.
Now, the entrance hall, like the exterior,
has a very particular and powerful meaning.
A meaning to do with the new nation
of the United States.
Jefferson called this his lndian hall,
because he embellished it
with lndian artefacts along
with other artefacts and objects
from this great new promised land -
to make it clear that it had a unique
very powerful individual identity.
As you walk around, it's clear how much
Jefferson was inspired by European culture.
But Monticello is more compact and
practical than grand and ostentatious.
And also on the ground floor
Jefferson's own private world.
He wanted to make this house convenient and
comfortable as well as a political statement.
And so here he has this bed alcove.
So he gets into bed this side.
So morning cock crows, up comes Jefferson -
and steps straight into his study.
Practical chap,
can get on with his scientific experiment,
and all the time one sees emerging
in this house this new nation,
with all its power, with all its complexity,
with all its contradictions of course.
Monticello with its 5,000 acre estate
offers an idyllic vision of the New World.
A green and plentiful Arcadia.
But it has dark secrets that lie at the heart
of the Great American Dream.
Despite his fine liberal pronouncements,
Jefferson supported the forcible removal
of native American tribes from their land,
and exploited slave labour
on his plantations at Monticello.
When he died in 1809,
Jefferson chose his beloved Monticello
for his final resting place.
The memorial bears testament
to his proudest achievements,
including the Declaration of lndependence
and the statue establishing religious freedom.
So those are great things, admirable things.
But of course there are other sides to the man.
He was a paradox.
Even after he'd written the words
that all men are created equal,
he kept slaves to serve his needs.
And l suppose in a way,
one can say he was a victim of the age,
despite his vision he was very much
a man of the late 18th century.
He liked the common man, but at a distance.
And in a way, the paradoxes,
the flaws in his character,
are the flaws and paradoxes in the very nation
which was involved in creating -
a nation dedicated to freedom, to vision,
to the expression of individual rights.
Jefferson is revered as a hero
by many Americans,
but not all,
as l find out when l talk to Ben Thomas,
who served as a marine corps sergeant
in Vietnam.
Well, l'll say,
l'll say that he was a brilliant man.
But l also said that he helped write
the Declaration of lndependence
which said all men was created equal.
He forgot the clause they should have
had in there, 'except black'.
Because at that time he owned
five thousand slaves, when he wrote it.
Jefferson is said to have fathered
an illegitimate child
with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings.
l asked Ben what he thinks about that.
There was an engineer out at the airport -
and one day we was talking about
Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson,
and President Clinton and Lewinsky.
So he said, 'oh, they're both the same,
they're both the same.'
So l said, 'l - l beg your pardon, my good man.'
l said, 'the women that slept with Clinton
did it because they wanted to,
the women that slept with Thomas Jefferson
had to because he owned them.'
That gentleman never spoke to me
from that day until this very day.
He never spoke to me again.
So it seems the contradictions and the broken
promises of the American Dream
can be traced right back to Jefferson.
By the time l reached Washington station,
l hadn't slept for nearly 40 hours
and l'm weary beyond words.
The constant travelling
and long hours are catching up with me.
But if there's one place which can
reinvigorate me, it's my next port of call.
New York is one of the world's greatest
and most vibrant cities.
l arrive at my hotel after midnight.
My spirits perk up as l look out
over the Queensborough bridge.
l love this city.
lt feeds the body and the soul.
l'm off to see a treasure
that represents the aspirations, the pride,
the claims, the hopes of a nation,
a symbol recognised around the world.
l want to see if it lives up to its reputation.
The Statue of Liberty
is one of the world's most famous icons.
Behind its kitsch image lie powerful truths.
Like Jefferson's Monticello,
it embodies so much of what is admirable
and what is troubling about the United States.
She stands 47 metres high, hollow
and inside is a spiral staircase,
and the idea was from the start
that people would go up the staircase
and go into a viewing platform,
just within - within her crown. Terrific.
- And this in front of me is the door,
the public door leading to the viewing platform.
But as you can see, it's closed.
And there are crowds of people here
all wanting to get up.
lt's been closed since the attack
of 9/11 on the World Trade Centre Tower,
the twin towers just over there.
Sadly, there are no plans to reopen
the spectacular staircase offering this terrific
and tremendous view from the image
of liberty over the great city of New York.
lf this is to be a symbol of freedom and liberty,
then it has to be just that.
The power to say, 'we are a free country -
and we will operate as
we intend this symbol to represent.'
But no, alas, it's closed down.
Terror has won
and the internal world of the statue
is denied me and everybody else.
Bad.
lt's a far cry from the spirit in
which it was conceived in 1865.
A gift from France to the United States,
the statue was to celebrate the final abolition
of slavery and the centenary of independence.
The statue was designed by the sculptor,
August Bartholdi
and the engineer Gustave Eiffel.
They built the colossus
out of sheet copper beaten
and moulded over a steel and iron skeleton.
lt was prefabricated in France in sections
before being shipped to New York for assembly.
lt was supposed to be the
great symbol of freedom,
but from day one was dogged by controversy.
Suffragettes protested
that if Liberty were a woman,
why do women have so few rights in America?
l suppose most troubling of all
is the fact that when the statue
was unveiled eventually in October 1886,
things had changed very radically
for the worst in America.
Draconian new immigration laws were brought in,
keeping out the sick and the poor,
criminals, dissidents and Chinese labourers.
People fleeing oppression and poverty
were given the briefest glimpse of liberty
as they arrived at Ellis lsland
in the shadow of the statue.
Their dreams were cruelly crushed
as they were turned away,
often with families torn apart.
Many did not make it
back to their homelands alive.
l find the statue so enthralling
because it embodies the paradox of America.
She's certainly a very ingenious construction.
Very elegant actually.
And of course she's one of this big family
of colossal figures dating back to antiquity:
the Colossus of Rhodes or many of those
great images around the world.
l've seen one already in Rio,
Christ the Redeemer.
And she's certainly more handsome.
l'm seeing her for what she is.
And she is a thing of beauty, if flawed,
if there are many contradictions,
which there are.
What liberty? What liberty now?
But nevertheless, as an ideal, as an aspiration
she is sublime.
ln 1886 the Statue of Liberty
must have seemed like a giant.
All that was soon to change.
The 20th century heralded
an ambitious new age for America,
one which is encapsulated by my next treasure.
When you think of the great modern cities,
you picture a towering skyline.
This brave new world started in
New York and Chicago
more than a century ago.
Manhattan was to become the world's
first vertical metropolis,
a showcase for the engineering miracle
called the skyscraper.
The Statue of Liberty
aspired to the American Dream,
but the skyscraper delivered it.
lt has become the great symbol
of commerce and Capitalism.
My next treasure is a skyscraper.
My challenge is choosing one.
There are so many contenders.
The Flatiron Building
is the best of New York's early skyscrapers.
Completed in 1902 to designs of D. H. Burnham,
it has a pioneering steel frame construction,
but outside it's clad in stone and made to look
rather like an extruded ltalianate palazzo.
Rather charming, also rather odd.
But it's not my treasure.
For many, the Chrysler building
embodies the golden age of the skyscraper,
when art deco was the style of choice for the
image-conscious magnates of Manhattan.
The Empire State building
and the Chrysler building,
both completed in the late 1920s,
are icons of skyscraper design.
They are technically superb,
both with massive steel frames,
constructed very, very quickly indeed,
yet over this modern steel frame
there is still a veneer of history.
They still pay homage to the past.
The Chrysler even with gargoyles.
They are superb but they're not my treasures.
ln fact, this is my treasure.
lt's not the tallest at only 39 stories high,
nor is it the oldest.
lt dates from the unfashionable '50s.
Yet l adore the Seagram building.
Now many people will be surprised,
even shocked that
l've chosen this rather than
the Flatiron building, the Chrysler building -
or the Empire State building.
But for me,
this is where those buildings were leading.
This is a quintessence
of skyscraper commercial design.
An amazing object.
lt's an honest, ruthless, elegant expression -
- of its means of construction,
materials of construction, and of its use.
The Seagram building was designed by
the German architect Ludovic Mies van der Rohe,
who emigrated to the United States in 1937.
Mies preached simplicity and clarity,
but he did not stint on costs.
His masterpiece has specially-tinted glass
to reduce glare
and its steel frame was
clad on the outside with bronze.
This made the Seagram, per square metre,
the most expensive skyscraper of its time.
The building is set in its own small square,
to give it maximum light and unlimited views.
Unlike traditional New York skyscrapers,
which rose up from the pavement's edge
to form dark, canyon-like streets.
Although the building doesn't have any obvious
or superficial references to
past historical styles of architecture,
Mies was deeply influenced
by architectural history,
particularly by the rational constructional
systems of Greece and Rome.
He loved columns supporting entablatures,
vertical and horizontal.
And you get that here, on the entrance.
His columns, this great horizontal element above.
And the curtain walling, which is this
glass skin over the steel frames inside.
Very rational.
Simply curtain wall is like a curtain
wrapped round the structural frame -
not structural itself, simply hung there.
lncredible detailing.
l love these little steel l-section columns that
brace up the whole curtain wall there.
Now inside.
The entrance hall. Absolutely fascinating.
Very revealing.
This is bold simplicity, very vocal simplicity.
Mies said, 'less is more.' And this is it.
Just beauty coming from the simplest of forms.
He got to the essence of things,
stripped back, inspired by history,
but he wanted to get
to the central qualities of history.
He loved classical proportions, golden section,
root two, two to one proportion.
Those things he believed would give power
and memory to the most simple of spaces.
And here we see it in his entrance hall.
A powerful space achieved simply by proportion.
No obvious overlay of grandeur or history.
l love it.
One, two, three, four simple lift doors,
punched in the wall,
but of a beautiful proportion
with incredibly simple detailing.
That's what it's about.
Power through simplicity. Less is more.
God in the detail.
38th floor. Astonishing lift.
This dates apparently from 1958,
when the building was complete. lncredible.
Oh my goodness, extraordinary dazzle pattern,
but here we see Mies' sort of high tech.
This is almost 50 years old, this interior,
and it's so modern,
pioneering, cutting edge, still.
That's the thing, when you get to the essence
of things it's timeless isn't it?
Beautiful detail here. Everything's thought out
and reduced to the functional essence.
l love this, it's all steel and copper. Dramatic.
Peep into each floor. So here we go.
Level 38, the top of the building more or less.
The floor is currently unoccupied
and it shows off the benefits
of this type of building.
Now, this is the great thing about metal
framed buildings, they're very flexible.
All the loads are carried on columns and one can
have partitions like this put in and moved around.
They're not structural.
This one has a great, as l say, open plan.
Very good sort of thing
for all sorts of different uses.
And ah, vindicated really.
Light flooding in and terrific views out.
The whole point, as l said before,
of this sort of architecture with the
curtain walling being entirely glazed,
one has glass from floor to ceiling and no wall,
because the - the structure is being
carried on the columns back there,
or the occasional columns,
there's one over there.
So l say - here we go,
the whole point of a building like this,
light flooding in, terrific views out.
The skyscraper reached its apogee in Manhattan.
But somewhere along the line the bold and
ethical vision of building cities in the skies
has been lost and confused.
Skyscrapers are part of a - an urban ideal,
part of a vision of a futuristic city of towers.
They were meant to harness
technology to help man,
they were to realise high rise housing
giving working people light,
healthy area homes with a great prospect,
or they're meant to provide commercial
space in tight city centres.
But the vision was betrayed.
The high rise housing became housing hells,
terrible ghettos.
And office blocks really
became images of commercial greed.
So towers have become symbols of all
that's wrong with modern urban living.
Most of my treasures in North America were born
from worthy principles and high ideals
and ended up being compromised.
And today this nation, conceived in the battle
for liberty and democracy,
offers a divided world a stark choice:
accept the American way
or face the consequences.