I’m making a TV show!
Here’s why: When I was moving to New York, I told my leasing agent that I wanted a place with charm and character. She told me that if that’s what I want, I need to look for apartments built before World War II.
“So you’re saying we’ve basically built nothing with charm and character in the past 80 years?”
“That’s right.”
This is happening all over the world. The same boring and generic style has spread to the entire world. 150 years ago, new buildings in Shanghai looked nothing like the ones in Rome or Tokyo or San Francisco or Buenos Aires. The architecture of each place was as varied as the landscape itself.
And it’s not just the sameness of the modern world that has me scratching my head, but also the carelessness behind so much of what’s built these days. We boast about the triumphs of technology and how advanced we are as a civilization, but why has our built environment regressed so much? Shouldn’t we use our wealth to make our streets more charming and delightful?
There’s lots of talk about how we’ve polluted the natural world, but what about how we’ve polluted the man-made world? We’ve filled our streets with ugly railings, benches, lampposts, and clutter.
We assume these things have to be boring, but they don’t. Good design can make everything, even bins and bus stops, charming. New things can be prettier than old things. The first step is believing it’s possible.
Something has changed. We’ve taken a dramatic turn, and the majority of people prefer what we used to build to what we build today. Just look at where people take photos. In New York it’s the steps of brownstones in the West Village; in San Francisco it’s the old Victorian homes; in London there’s tourists galore in front of those iconic red phone booths which remain on the streets, even though they don’t work anymore, because they’re so nicely designed that people like having them there.
All this is what inspired me to make a TV show.
First: a pilot episode which now has 5.4 million views, 23,000 comments, and 379,000 likes. It also has 241,000 YouTube subscribers from that one video, which is just about unheard of for a new channel.
And now: a full-on, six-episode series.
But when I pitched Hollywood on the idea, they said cultural series of this sort don’t work: “The only kinds of documentaries that get funded are about sports, music, nature, or true crime.” Huh? How can that be?
People are interested in culture. The problem is most culture documentaries are terrible. They fail in one of two ways: (1) people dumb down the ideas in patronizing ways, or (2) people use so much jargon and high-falutin language that it becomes boring and inaccessible.
This is why I’m producing this work. It’ll be called The Modern World, and it’ll be a tour of art & architecture through the eyes of Sheehan Quirke, who goes by
@culturaltutor.
It’s our ambition to do for the man-made world what Planet Earth did for the natural world. To use cinematic imagery and simple language in a way that everybody can understand. And to be rigorous, but not in a way that feels like school or your know-it-all friend who never stops talking.
The potential here is huge. Architecture impacts literally every person on earth. What we build shapes the moods of people and the spirit of our culture.
We’ll film in six countries (the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States) to produce six 30-minute episodes which we hope to publish on a major streaming service. We’re currently in the fundraising stage, and production begins once we’ve raised the money.
It’s our mission to help people see the world more clearly, and in turn, make the world a more charming and delightful place to live in.
I’m making a show about buildings.
The concept is simple: do for the man-made world what Planet Earth did for the natural world.
But, when I pitched the idea, the answer was that nobody would watch it.
So I released a pilot episode on YouTube. It’s got 5.4 million views, 379k likes, and 23k comments.
People are interested, and now it’s time to make the full show.
Six episodes, filming in the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the USA, and releasing on a streaming service like HBO, Netflix, or Prime.
Why does this show matter?
First: we’re surrounded by buildings all the time. Look around yourself, right now… what do you see? Buildings are the logical conclusion of everything a society believes in. That’s the real focus of this show: not the buildings themselves, but what they say about us.
Second: there’s global dissatisfaction with modern architecture. This feeling gets written about online, but nobody’s given a voice to it on film or TV. That’s what this show will be. But this isn’t just about criticising modernity. That’s easy. This is about learning from the past in order to understand and improve the present, for everybody.
Third: there’s a drought of high-quality culture shows. When I spoke to film executives they said that only documentaries about sports, music, or true crime get funded. That’s a colossal missed opportunity. Galleries are always full, content about architecture goes viral online all the time, and people spend their precious holidays visiting beautiful cities.
Why no shows about architecture, then?
Tourists flock in their millions to see (for example) the buildings of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. But, if you asked those same people if they’re interested in “architecture”, they’d probably say no.
To put that another way: not many people want to watch “a show about architecture”, but lots of people want to watch a show that illuminates the real world they’re living in, each and every day.
What will the show be like?
Six episodes, going chronologically through history and arriving at the present, each focussing on the architecture and design of a specific period:
1. Middle Ages
2. Renaissance
3. Enlightenment
4. The Nineteenth Century
5. Art Nouveau & Art Deco
6. Present Day
But, in each case, the point isn’t just to learn about that era; the point is to learn about our modern world through those eras and what they’ve left behind. If you watch the pilot episode (included below) you’ll see what I mean.
So the show’s not really “about” the past; it’s about the twenty-first century.
That’s why it’s called The Modern World.
When you think of a typical history show there are loads of interviews, stock footage, archive photos, historical recreations, and graphics. We’re doing none of that. Everything will be filmed on location, because we’re telling our story only through the real world that exists right now. And, rather than going to the most obvious places, we’ll focus on buildings that aren’t well-known but should be more famous.
But that’s all big picture; what will it be like on screen?
Buildings used to look different in every country, and now they look the same. Why? Because the weather is different everywhere, and buildings were always a way of dealing with that weather, using local materials. Now we have air conditioning and we ship concrete around the world, so we don’t need to design our buildings with regard to local weather or rely on local materials.
Look at really old clocks and you’ll notice something: they don’t have a second hand… because it was only invented 300 years ago! Then you look at the present and you realise we’re surrounded by timers, by seconds ticking down and ticking up relentlessly. If we’re looking for a cause of our anxiety-inducing culture, that might be it.
When you spend time with the sun-softened bricks and time-warped timbers of old cities you notice that synthetic materials like plastic have taken over. When we’re surrounded by things that feel temporary, how do you think it makes us feel?
It’s only by seeing 19th century train stations, designed like cathedrals, that you realise tradition and technology aren’t enemies. New things don’t have to look boring: if the Victorians had designed AI data centres, they’d look like Medieval castles.
In the 1920s, at the zenith of Art Deco, people believed technology would uplift humanity. That’s why they decorated their buildings with statues inspired by electricity. Only by seeing their enthusiasm can we realise our own cynicism, and perhaps begin to fix it.
All of that… and much, much more.
But, above all else, this show is about a way of seeing. If you want to understand any society then you need to look at what it creates, not what it says about itself.
There’s a worldview in every single object; our skyscrapers are designed the same way as our phones. Learn to look at this world, to notice its details, and everything else starts to make sense.
What now?
I’ve been quiet online recently because I’ve been researching and working on scripts for six full-length episodes. Production begins when we’ve raised the funding.
The Modern World is coming.
