"Seven bottles of light in a stone box"

Friday April 25, Seattle, Washington, USA

Travelling north to Seattle feels like going on retreat.
The last few days have been extraordinary. My colleague John Wyver and I have met more than sixty young artists during whirlwind casting sessions in New York and Los Angeles. We've been trying to find two artists with sufficient bravura and artistic merit to feature in a forthcoming television series called Art Race. The premise of the show is simple: is it possible to cross the USA on a single dollar, surviving only on art? We think we've cast the right artists -- but that's another blog.

The two-and-a-half hour flight from Los Angeles passes smoothly and I arrive late at night in a rather shabby, smelly mid-town hotel. The establishment's only mitigating comfort (apart from my room's bed) is the wonderful view it affords of Rem Koolhaas's neighbouring Public Library.
I'm in Seattle, Washington to film the final building of the Christianity film, the Chapel of St.Ignatius on the Seattle University campus. Designed by local wonder-architect Steven Holl, the building is acclaimed as an incredible exercise in shade and light or as Holl describes it, "seven bottles of light in a stone box". Sniffily, I begin to wonder whether his claim might only be empty "architecture-speak"

Early next morning, cameraman Kevin and sound-man Tom have their own reservations. "Doesn't look all that from the outside," they offer helpfully. Maybe, maybe not, but blue skies are forecast and soon we'll have the opportunity of seeing the building in optimum conditions. We've given ourselves only a single day to capture everything we'll need and, with a couple of masses and a wedding to negotiate, the next few hours promise to be fairly full.

At hand to illuminate us is Father Cobb. A professor at the university, Father Cobb worked with Holl from the building's conception, and proves one of the most effective communicators of the entire series. He has an incredible knowledge -- and passion -- for the building. We're in good hands.
Father Cobb explains the building's genesis (from a water-colour by Holl) and then lays out the broad brush-strokes of the building's design -- the basic procession from grassy lawn to reflecting pool and on to the chapel itself. This is a natural flow which embraces the campus while simultaneously preparing the Catholic congregation for worship.

We learn too about the building's remarkable construction; how twenty-one separate wall-panels were set and then raised into place as interlocking tablets, all in a single day. And we the chapel doors made from Alaskan cedar; Holl has a remarkable skill at designing large heavy-looking doors which are in fact light as a feather to push open. These are beautiful, hand-carved creations.
It's not until we enter the building that the building's true beauty is revealed. Time magazine described Holl recently as "the best architect working in America" and the accolade appears justified when one has the time to spend in any of his interiors. I should confess to being an enormous Holl fan -- during two series of Artland, our recent cultural road-trip through America, we visited several of Holl's creations including the fabulous Bloch Building at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas. Each one has surprised me with its tireless invention and sense of play.
Evident in the St. Ignatius chapel are the seven "bottles of light" which Holl writes about: pools of light refracted through coloured windows, a sort of re-imagining of more classical stained-glass. And consistent with the Bloch Building, it appears impossible to count the interior surfaces -- there are no two alike in the entire space.

Father Cobb talks us through the stunning font, the confessional space and explains in detail about the way the light changes in the building. More than ten years on from the chapel's inauguration, he says that he's still surprised at how the building changes throughout the day, and indeed from day to day.
The afternoon comes and we have a wedding to film. The bride and groom have kindly allowed us to film during the ceremony and the run-up to the service too. I'm rather fascinated to see that this side of the Atlantic the wedding photos take place before the ceremony. I also can't help thinking that the wedding guests must believe we're the scruffiest, laziest wedding videographers they've ever seen (particularly as we have to wrap before the exchange of vows).
Finally, there's just the opportunity to sneak round the university's art collection. Father Cobb curates the acquisitions and has built up a modest, but impeccably chosen array which is presented to be as accessible as possible for the students. I leave campus with two lovely memories; firstly, the interior of the St. Ignatius chapel, and secondly a student in the campus canteen, tucking into his lunch, perhaps regardless of the priceless Chuck Close portrait just above him. (Seb Grant)

A long way from anywhere

Sunday April 13 - Monday April 14, Cairo, Egypt
It was all going so well. Indeed it has been one of the most interesting day's filming I think I've ever done. But now it's past 11pm and the crew bus has broken down. We are 50km from Cairo, there's desert all around, and on the highway trucks thunder past. Their frequent horn blasts celebrate that they're on their way home -- and that we're not.

With our fixer Romaney and crew of four (our cameraman joins us at the location), I left Cairo yesterday morning. We first drove north, went under the Suez Canal and then down the east coast of the Red Sea before turning into the desert mountains and up to the foot of Mount Sinai. A journey of seven hours and numerous military checkpoints. Tedious as it is, there's some consolation in the notion that even well into the twentieth century making this pilgrimage took days and days on camels.

We've come to film at the Greek Orthodox monastery of St Catherine's, the oldest continuously inhabited Christian community in the world. Monks like Father Justin, our exceptional guide, have celebrated their faith here for some 1,700 years, rising each morning for prayers at 4.30am.
Sunday afternoon we recce the monastery, with Father Justin taking us around the compact site of the basilica, chapels, living quarters and a library crammed inside towering defensive walls. These were sponsored by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century CE and they include high on one side a wooden hut from which a basket could be lowered to the ground. Until the nineteenth century this was the only way in or out of what was effectively a desert fortress.
The next morning we start filming at 6am but many of the pilgrims who now come here in organised coach parties have been up since 2am, climbing to the top of Mount Sinai to worship and to see the dawn come up over the Red Sea. As we scramble around on the rocks of the valley (that's the crew below), we see the faithful straggling back, on foot and camel, ready to visit St Catherine's during the three hours that it is open to visitors on five mornings each week.
We go inside -- through a conventional door -- and spend the morning being taken around by Father Justin. Just before midday inside the main basilica we are privileged to watch, and to film, the veneration of the relics of St Catherine. What are believed to be the saint's skull and her left hand, both encased in silver reliquaries, are brought out for the faithful -- almost all from Russia -- to file past and to kiss. Many also kiss the icons of the basilica's iconostasis and all are given a silver ring by a priest to commemorate the moment. To me, this ritual, which has been taking place for a millennium and more, is simply unfathomable, but I deeply respect the importance that it has for all those taking part.
There's much that's remarkable about the building and the community: the presence of the Burning Bush, believed to be that which God used through which to speak to Moses; the presence alongside the main basilica of a mosque; the astonishing collection of icons, many of which are in the basilica but some of which are also displayed in a well-presented museum; and overall the extraordinary sense of sacred continuity.

In the afternoon we interview Father Justin in the library of St Catherine's, which contains one of the world's greatest collections of sacred manuscripts. The climate and the monastery's remoteness have ensured the survival of an astonishing number of precious manuscripts and printed books. Putting up lights here and moving around with the camera makes me as nervous as I've ever been on a shoot. I have next-to-no desire to be known as the person responsible for burning to the ground one of the world's great libraries. But all goes smoothly as Father Justin shows us an illuminated document from a Muslim Ottoman ruler granting St Catherine's the right to continue to worship within the Christian faith. He speaks movingly about the importance of the close relationship between the monks and the Muslim Bedouin with whom the monastery has lived and worked alongside for centuries. As he concludes with thoughts about how this coexistence has lessons for the world today, a mobile phone of one of the crew goes off. Grrrr. We re-take and all's well.

That is, until the breakdown nine or so hours later. Romaney gets on the phone, and although it doesn't seem as if there's an Egyptian version of the RAC, he has his son drive out from Cairo to rescue some of us and then a tow truck come for the bus. When we finally get to where we're spending the night, an ice cold beer goes down very well. (John Wyver)

Church of the Holy Fool

Tuesday April 15 - Thursday April 17, Moscow, Russia
I arrive in Moscow after a four hour flight from London in the late afternoon. It is 3 degrees, raining, and very very grey, which somehow seems appropriate. At that time of day the 40 km journey by cab into central Moscow takes three hours. I learn on arrival at the hotel (my cab driver speaks no English and I realise I have no more than six words of Russian) that this is completely normal. Rush hour traffic in Moscow is now completely out of hand with the growing population and swelling numbers who choose to travel by car.

The next morning I walk to Red Square to meet our crew outside St Basil’s Cathedral – camerman Sasha, soundman Dmitri and – equally invaluably – fixer and translator Anna.
St Basil’s, built between 1555 and 1561 to commemorate Ivan the Terrible’s victory over the Tartar Mongols in Kazan, is actually an exuberant cluster of churches, with one in the centre surrounded by eight auxiliary churches each topped with a unique onion dome. A ninth was consecrated to Moscow’s “holy fool” St Basil and built to house his grave some twenty five years later. Since then the cathedral has been popularly known by his name.

The powerfully Eastern design, with its swirling extravagant array of rainbow colours and red brick towers is completely unique. “There is nothing like it, not just in Moscow, but in all of Russia,” Anna tells me. For her, Red Square is “like stepping back in time into the old Russia. It’s one of the few places where not very much has changed.”
We go inside the cathedral and are met by our interviewee, chief curator of St Basil’s, Liubov Uspenskaya. She graduated in art history in 1964 and has worked there ever since. She is serious and direct, “a typical old-style Soviet woman” Sasha observes. Certainly she has little time for the legend that Ivan the Terrible, on seeing how beautiful the cathedral was, had its architect blinded to prevent him from building anything of comparable magnificence for anyone else. She is equally dismissive of the tale that Stalin wanted it knocked down to facilitate troop movements out of Red Square. There is, however, more substance to Napoleon reputedly ordering its destruction on discovering that he couldn’t have it taken back to Paris with him.
Inside the cathedral is small and intimate, the separate dimly-lit churches connected by narrow passageways. A highlight is the beautiful blue and gold iconostasis -- a wall of icons and religious paintings separating the nave from the altar and a distinguishing feature of all Russian orthodox churches.
Mrs Uspenskaya laments that most Muscovites see only the outside of St Basil’s. Very few bother to look inside. They have a marvel on their doorstep and yet they travel miles to visit churches in Rome and Paris.

After the interview, we go back outside for some more exterior filming under the watchful eye of a man from the Kremlin. We are being charged a staggering £450 per hour for permission to film in Red Square. Even though we paid upfront for two hours, he seems restless after ninety minutes and suddenly orders us to stop. I protest at the obvious unfairness, but Anna says we must accept it. “You cannot argue with these people. They are very difficult.”
Time then for an extremely late lunch. I ask the Russian crew, out of curiosity, what they make of the Litvinenko poisoning in London. Dmitri, the sound recordist, tells me he has recently spent two weeks filming Andrei Lugovoi (wanted by British police on suspicion of the murder) at close quarters for a documentary. “What kind of man did he strike you as?” I ask. “Very clever, very successful, very well connected and utterly insistent that he is innocent,” Dmitri replies. Hmmm. It seems then as though we’ll never know. (Linda Zuck)

In the shadow of the Gherkin

Wednesday April 9 - Thursday April 10, London, England
I'm in the City of London walking round in circles in the shadow of Lord Foster's 30 St Mary's Axe (more commonly known as the Gherkin), and I'm struggling to find Bevis Marks, the oldest synagogue in Great Britain.

My poor map-reading is not entirely to blame. When the synagogue's building contract was signed on the February 12 1699 Jews were not permitted to build on the public thoroughfare, and consequently the synagogue was built in a discreet "open yard" just off what in now Bevis Marks Street.
Several calls to the cameraman later and we've found one another, the synagogue and also Maurice Bitton. Maurice is the building's curator and a lifelong worshipper at the synagogue. He recalls his Bar Mitzvah here as well as attending Schul with his father when he was only five years old. He now lives adjacent to the building and Bevis Marks seems very much in his life-blood. The interview is scheduled for the next day and today we have about five hours to film the building itself.
As is the case with buildings in the rest of the series, the synagogue looks unlike any other which we've visited previously. It possesses none of the rugged compactness of the Old New Synagogue in Prague nor the splendour of the Dohany in Budapest. Rather it has an elegance and reserve which feels distinctly Protestant -- an impression confirmed by the large bay windows which flood the building with natural light.

The explanation for this aesthetic could be down to the master builder, Joseph Avis, a Quaker carpenter who had previously worked with Christopher Wren on St Bride's in Fleet Street. But there are other influences too, most notably the Spanish and Portugese Great Synagogue in Amsterdam (which seats 1,500 to Bevis Marks' 500)
The interior is also very straightforward and includes the oldest Cromwellian benches still in use today, pleasingly crafted in dark oak. Dramatic candelabras plunge down from the ceiling and Maurice tells us that when lit, the effect can be breathtaking, particularly for evening weddings. We spend the day there and enjoy the building's restful aura and straightforward surroundings. (Perhaps Ian enjoys it slightly less, as he's the one doing all the work.)

The following morning and we've arranged to meet teacher Aysha Khanom and pupils from Halley Primary School who will be given a tour around the synagogue by Maurice. The children, perhaps a dozen in total, behave impeccably throughout the hour or so which we're with them, and ask the questions which many adults might shirk from: "Why do men and women sit in different parts of the synagogue? Where are the pictures of Jesus?" The children are mostly Muslim and they are respectful, polite and sensitive to this sacred place -- I can't remember filming with a more lovely or lively bunch of schoolkids. If anyone from Halley School is reading this -- they are a credit to the school.

Maurice too should be commended for admirably fielding the children's questions, and later on, some of mine. He knows the building inside out and has done a fair bit of television, not the least of which was taking the part of the Synagogue Beadle in the BBC's adaptation of Daniel Deronda. He offers a history of the building as well as explaining its role within the community. Interestingly, he says that a gentle revival is happenning. The synagogue has been rejuvenated by a young rabbi who is attracting many of the local Jewish city workers and once again the building is becoming popular as a regular place of worship.

It's our final location for the Judaism film and somehow appropriate. Masada, Budapest, New York, Czech Republic, Philadelphia, and now a building about 15 minutes from our offices. Or about two hours if you were to rely on my directions. (Seb Grant)