(energetic electronic guitar music)
This time we reveal the massive challenges
behind creating a modern city.
We've got one shot to get this right.
The second time is gonna cost you big money.
From a radical space saving skyscraper
taking shape in the heart of London...
If we were to drop anything from up here,
got serious implications down on the ground.
To the window cleaners risking their lives
to keep Las Vegas shining.
If I don't make it tell my children I love 'em.
And the team behind creating
visionary city architecture.
(intense instrumental music)
Half the world's population live in urban areas,
and the number is rising every second.
Each day is a race again time to house, feed, water,
and move more than 3.5 billion people.
It's an impossible daily challenge.
The slightest glitch can bring a city to its knees.
And every 24 hours it has to be done all over again.
This is the story of How Cities Work.
(swelling orchestral music)
(gentle percussive music)
The world's cities are growing
at a faster rate than every before.
An estimated 75 million people around the world
move to an urban area every year.
As our metropolises become more and more crowded,
architects, designers and builders
face a constant challenge:
how to create new and modern spaces in cities
where every square centimeter has already been developed.
One solution has proved popular worldwide.
Since the year 2000, over 4,000 skyscrapers
have been built around the world.
Today, in Central London,
one of the city's most revolutionary skyscrapers
is entering the final stages of construction.
This is 20 Fenchurch Street,
a 64,000-square-meter commercial office building
nicknamed the Walkie-Talkie
because of its unusual flared shaped.
But what makes this building so distinctive
is also what makes it almost impossible to build,
as Director of Construction Cormac MacCrann
knows all too well.
Generally our buildings go straight up,
they're square or rectangles,
so when you see a building like this you say, "Oh my God,"
and that was our challenge:
how we were going to build this building
that went in a counterintuitive way
to every other building in the city.
The dramatic curving sides of this skyscraper
are not just for show; they have been designed
to solve a crucial urban problem: overcrowding.
The architect had a great idea.
He said normally skyscrapers go straight up
or they taper in as you get up.
Let's do it the other way. Let's invert it.
The building is unique
in that it has a smaller footprint at the bottom.
The smallest one is level three,
which is 1,900 square meters,
and it increases as you go up to level 34,
which is 3,300 square meters.
By increasing the size of each floor
as the building rises,
the Walkie-Talkie can provide 40% more floor space
than a more conventional skyscraper of the same height.
We can get a density, an occupational density,
in this building of something like eight people
per square meters, compared to, in the old days,
it would be one per 12 square meters.
(workers chattering)
Today, Cormac's team
must install part of the Walkie-Talkie's roof,
called a hockey stick, before the arrival in three hours
of a main arched roof beam.
We have the fins coming, the actual roof pieces
coming in tonight, so we have to get these in and ready.
Hockey sticks are the vertical columns
that will support each of the 34 arched roof beams.
If you went into an aircraft hanger, for instance,
you'd see something like this.
The challenge is aircraft hangers are built on the ground.
We're building this 160 meters up in the air.
We've never done that before. It's never been done before.
(chattering)
When we first started on the job
it was pretty much a straightforward job going up,
but soon as you get to the roof,
it's just different altogether,
it's a different way of thinking.
(chatter on radio)
We're just about to land one of the hockey sticks
that make up the sides of the roof.
I actually enjoy the height.
One of the best views in London.
There's only a few buildings taller than this.
(workers chattering)
(chatter on radio)
(machine whirring)
Ah, fuck's sake.
(chatter on radio)
That's us in.
With the hockey stick in place
the crew are ready for the main event.
Yeah, we'll just check all our lifting gear are ready.
I've heard them readying the cranes
for when the wagon turns up, and rock and roll.
As night begins to fall on London,
the first of three arched steel roof beams
arrives at 20 Fenchurch Street...
into the capable hands of Project Manager Dean Eaves
and his team.
Previously we installed the hockey sticks,
which are the vertical elements.
Now these three roof members will then connect to that
to form the complete structure of the roof arch.
The fin beams each weigh a massive 10 tons
and must be lifted onto the roof
right over one of the busiest areas in London.
(anxious piano music)
The only option to get the beams up safely
is to close off a large section
of Fenchurch Street to the public.
The sections are too long to offload
from any of our other delivery route
so we need Fenchurch Street closed
to be able to lift them straight up to the roof.
But closing one of the busiest streets
in London is only possible at night
and for a short window of time.
To rig and lift each piece
will take approximately 45 minutes to an hour.
We need to be done by 4:00 a.m.
The team must work as quickly as possible
to beat the ticking clock.
(crewmen chattering)
And we'll get it all up,
get the road open again as quickly as possible.
(tense music)
180 meters up at the top of the building,
crane driver Ray Hamilton is responsible
for making sure the heavy beams reach the roof safely.
You're approximately 600 feet above London at the moment,
so really the main variant we've got to worry about
is the wind, 'cause if the wind picks up
and catches east, and it begins to spin and rotate,
and you've got no control over it.
And right now the wind speeds are looking high.
The wind's sitting at about 19 mile a hour
and more at the top.
(chatter on radio)
I'm a bit concerned that the wind is up at the moment.
Really we're looking at 15 miles an hour
and under to lift them up.
It's a laugh at the gods.
You got all the computers that tells you the forecast
and various different things,
but you'll never know until you're there
at that precise time what it's gonna be like.
Down on the ground
the guys are rigging up the beam to the crane.
We're just attaching the lifting brackets to the piece.
But there is still no final word
on whether it is safe to carry out the lift.
15 miles an hour at the minute.
So you're getting the gusts with it, aren't you?
He's only getting 15-mile-an-hour winds,
but it's gusting up to 20, 25 mile an hour.
That's a jump, Tony. 22 there, you see that?
The size of these pieces that we're lifting,
they effectively would act like a sail
if they're caught by the wind.
If they can't do the lift tonight,
the beams will have to be sent back to the warehouse,
delaying the entire construction schedule.
We got it too far high, yeah?
Test it. If it's shit, we bring it back down.
Bring it down, right.
The crew decide to do a test lift
to see how the beam reacts in the wind.
We're gonna a little test lift now.
If it gets too windy, we'll bring it back down.
Watch your backs now. We'll start taking it up.
(crew chattering)
Nice and steady, yeah, nice and steady.
(tense music)
Yeah. Settle down.
I'm off.
(suspenseful orchestral music)
(chatter on radio)
It takes about four and half minutes
for the piece to actually get up here.
So, in that four and half minutes...
(snaps fingers)
the wind can change like that.
But as the first roof fin
inches its way up the building,
the crew struggle to keep the giant beam under control.
I'm gonna lose my rope, Dan!
I know, Kev. No worries, mate!
If the wind is too strong,
crane driver Ray may have to abort the lift.
(chatter on radio)
(suspenseful music)
At about the halfway point
the beam is caught by the wind and begins to turn.
Just the wind, even a slight breeze,
with it being as long as it is,
if it catches it, it will just twist in the wind.
In the crane, Ray has to make the decision
to continue the lift or bring the piece back down.
Well it can be easier actually to take it up
and over the top of the roof than it is to get it back down,
because you've got the other buildings there,
so that the spin could actually hurt them,
so you just need to kinda cross your fingers
and just go for it, you know?
At the top of the building,
Colin Brooks and his team
are waiting for the beam to arrive.
Yeah, she's sitting there now, Ray.
She's sitting round the right way for us.
(suspenseful music)
I've got hold of one of the taglines there now, Ray.
Because of the higher winds,
the guys must use all their strength
to steady the beam with guide ropes.
The wind can start turning the loads round.
And if that happens, it's sort of hands on deck.
(suspenseful music) (crew chattering)
Slowly on the head there, Ray.
Just coming to our hands there, mate.
Keep her coming on down for me, mate.
Keep it coming, buddy.
Keep it coming, Ray.
Keep it coming, mate.
Keep it coming.
Lovely job, Ray.
(metal clanging)
Okay, down we come.
We've de-rigged and sent the tackle back down,
and hopefully we're get another one up very shortly.
I'm hoping to, Ray.
As Ray sends the crane hook down
to pick up the second part of the roof beam,
the wind begins to die down.
It was blowing something like 20 odd mile an hour,
and it died down at the last there to just under 15.
Happy, mate. Ready when you are.
(triumphant rock music)
Taking advantage of the calmer weather,
the crew bring the next two beams up in quick succession.
Down a little touch more, mate. Keep it coming,
keep it coming on down for me. Beautiful, Ray.
That's us all down for the night now.
Just wrap up last bit of gear,
then make sure the crane driver's down safely.
We're all gonna jump in the lift and go home.
Tomorrow, installation of this roof beam
will begin.
We've got six of these roof fins up there, mate.
We've got 34 to do altogether, so another 28.
So, still a fair way to go just yet.
(triumphant rock music)
One of London's most revolutionary skyscrapers
takes another step towards completion.
(intense instrumental music)
Each new skyscraper in a city
seeks to make a statement in the skyline.
But as these round, tapered,
and sloping shapes become every more complex,
they have created a new urban challenge:
keeping these multimillion-pound constructions clean.
(energetic rock music)
And nowhere is this more evident than Las Vegas,
where each new construction is as much art as architecture.
(intense rock music)
Sam Shannon, Rick Dillman and their crew of window cleaners
take on jobs that others deem too dangerous
or too difficult to even attempt.
That is freaking big.
What do you think?
I think it's a whole hell of a lot of glass.
We like challenging jobs.
I mean, we kind of take pride in the fact
that we can work areas where other people can't get to.
The harder it is, the happier we are.
(anxious music)
These are the Panorama Towers,
two luxury apartment buildings built
just over a kilometer from Las Vegas's famous strip.
The towers' distinctive architectural trait
is a curved, inset balcony 95 meters in the air.
Two window cleaning companies have attempted
to clean these 14-meter-tall insets, but both have failed.
You've got all these ledges in between each story.
We'll have to watch out for edge protection.
Normal methods for cleaning high-rises,
such as a steel cradle, wouldn't work on Panorama Towers.
The inset balconies are too awkwardly shaped.
So Sam and his team must get inventive.
We're gonna have to use our rigging expertise
to figure out something that'll allow us to get there.
Seems like we're gonna have to repel down
right in the middle of the balcony.
Sam and Rick decided to abseil
down the side of the building, attached to just two ropes.
There's kinda three types of people:
there's people who won't do it
and the people who will do it if they have to,
and the people who want to do it,
and we're looking for the third guys.
Let's do it. -: Time to work. Woo!
(anxious music)
This is it. -: Woo!
128 meters up on the roof
they start to assemble their gear.
Let's get to it!
They have just one month
to clean 4,800 windows.
It's a decent size job.
We need to try to average about 305, 310 windows a day.
To lower themselves
over the side of the building
the team will use industrial-strength ropes
tied to metal anchors that can hold over four tons.
All right.
But the angular design of this skyscraper
presents a life-threatening hazard for the crew.
The building's sharp edges could sever their ropes.
This is basically a standard rope protector.
Because these edges are so sharp, it cuts through even this.
If this fails, now my ropes are exposed to danger,
my ropes are in danger of cutting.
To prevent disaster
the team have come up with a new invention.
What we've come up with and what's gonna be better,
this is just a basic, rough prototype right now,
is a rigid piece of PVC pipe, and the ropes go inside of it.
Their lives rest
on how well these new rope protectors work.
That'll work! -: Ready?
We ready to do this?
Bam. Let's do this, guys.
(tense music)
Oh, and that's what 400 feet or 125 meters looks like.
If I don't make it, tell my children I love 'em. (grunts)
It gets me every time.
It gives you the butterflies in the stomach,
the adrenaline rush, but that's what keeps me going.
We are working, we're working, and we go, you guys.
Let's go.
(suspenseful music)
Sam, Eugene, and Martin
start making their way around the curve of the building
towards the inset balcony.
The further you go up, the more windy it is.
There is a possibility that it could suck you away
from the building and throw you out in free space.
Ah, yes!
Sam's abseil ropes can only get him so far.
To get into the curved inset balcony
he must use suction cups
that allow him to stay close to the glass.
I'm getting some suction cups while I'm here
so that I can try to relax.
That is, when they work.
(dramatic music)
Woo!
Suction cup doesn't always suck.
My heart rate maybe jumped a beat a couple of times.
It pops, I poop my pants, I get back to work.
Sam finally makes it safely into the inset.
Now he can do the job he came here to do.
All right.
Despite the thousands of dollars
worth of equipment and the daredevil heights,
to actually clean the windows
the guys rely on old favorites: a bucket and sponge.
Just what you need to clean a window:
bunch of rags and a squeegee and some soapy water.
Oh yeah! We like that!
A million-dollar penthouse with a million-dollar view.
What a concept.
And the windows are clean for the first time in seven years.
Only maybe 3,772 windows to go.
(bright instrumental music)
(curious instrumental music)
With over 1,300 skyscrapers
currently rising skywards around the world
and each striving to be more dramatic than the last,
Sam and his crew are unlikely
to be out of a job anytime soon.
But an urban center isn't just defined
by the buildings that we live and work in.
Just as important are the structures
in which we can relax and enjoy ourselves.
Every year at the Serpentine Gallery in London
an architect is tasked with created a pavilion,
a structure entirely for public use.
Usually it's a cafe area that they can use
for different either conference or lecture, performance.
This year Sou Fujimoto has sought to redefine
how architecture interacts with the city.
His pavilion is made entirely of empty white steel tubes,
arranged in an intricate formation.
The basic inspiration, starting point,
was this beautiful surroundings of the hedged garden,
something between nature and architecture.
So I tried to create something transparent or translucent,
like a really thin cloud.
And up here and in here, when are we grinding those off?
Project Manager Ted Featonby and his team
must have the entire structure installed
and ready for a grand opening
in just six weeks, a mammoth task.
It's got to be ready for the fourth of June,
so sometimes we might have to work overnight.
It's just not an option not to be ready,
and that's the biggest challenge you've got,
you haven't got it over in time.
If we consider that this structure
has around 27,000 pieces of steel,
three and half thousand nut-welded nodes,
it's a lot of work that needs to be done
in quite a short space of time.
(light instrumental music)
Building this structure
is a mammoth undertaking.
It all happened here at Stage One,
a steel fabrication company in York, England.
Andy Hicton was the man tasked
with turning Sou Fujimoto's vision into reality.
We are well-known throughout the industry
as doing really very strange and complex devices.
It's a skill that you learn over a number of years.
(bright electronic music)
Welding bars together into cubed frames
sounds easy in theory, but the complexity of the design
was not always easy to follow.
You can get a little bit confused.
You're thinking, well which part of these 60 frame
am I working on here, that I'm putting together?
I'm not sure that's right.
And also the orientation, of course.
You don't want to end up with two layers of the frame
one way, the third layer, oh dear, it's not quite right.
This wasn't the only problem.
Completing a structure of this size and scale
pushed the team to bursting point.
So many have worked on it, get engrossed with it,
you lose a track of time, and you just keep going.
It's a very challenging job in that sense.
It looks simple, and some ways it is,
but other ways it has its unique challenges
which basically drives you mad.
Despite the challenges involved,
the team successfully completed the structure
in time for its journey to London.
The 54 pieces get delivered
on the back of 40-foot RTICs, and each piece is craned off.
Come up slow.
Every one is a bespoke shape.
There's no two pieces the same in the whole structure,
so each has its little challenge.
(anxious instrumental music)
Stop, down on the line.
Today it's time to fit one of the last pieces
to make up the transparent roof of the pavilion.
It is key to its structural integrity.
In a similar fashion to, say, an arch,
where you have a keystone
that drops into the top of the arch,
the final few pieces of the pavilion roof
make the structure stable.
Up slow please, Kev.
(anxious instrumental music)
But the long, thin form of this piece
is causing problems for the crew.
It's flexing everywhere.
Now stop. Come back down, Kev.
The shape of this piece is...
it's quite long and flexible and all, what to lift,
and we don't want to bend or snap any of the bars.
Drop that one right down further back.
Just gonna stiffen it up with a bar of timber
strapped on just to make sure it doesn't bend
and buckle the unit.
It's the first time we've worked with something like this.
You're never in your comfort zone.
Yeah, keep going slow, Kev.
(anxious electronic music)
Okay, Kev, take it up.
The piece is finally in the air,
but this is far from over.
(intense instrumental music)
Because of the structural weakness,
the crane driver must get it into position on the pavilion
as quickly and delicately as possible.
It's a bit like a Meccano set; everything fits together,
and it's just like a massive jigsaw puzzle.
But Ted and his team
are finding out that constructing a piece of art
is not always as straightforward
as building four walls and a roof.
(anxious instrumental music)
This piece of the puzzle doesn't fit.
That looks it. That's where it should be.
We've got extra pins.
See that pin there, where the board is?
Yeah. -: That's these two, isn't it?
This steel cloud is proving
to be a challenging mind game for the team.
Under normal circumstances, normal construction,
you'd pick a piece up, and the orientation
is quite obvious to which way it goes.
But with this everything's the same. It's so complex.
They soon work out their problem.
Is there a single notch stumping out there?
It is, isn't it?
So it's nearly the right way around, isn't it?
Right, up slow, Kev.
The piece is the wrong way round.
And stop, and slow right, slowly.
Down slow.
(anxious instrumental music)
Every little setback
has consequences for the tight schedule.
There's always a date where a show happens
or an event begins.
It's part and parcel of what we do, really.
That's endurance carpentry.
(upbeat instrumental music)
Over the next weeks, the team work all hours
to deliver the pavilion on time.
And finally, on a beautiful June day,
Sou Fujimoto's creation is unveiled.
(thrilling instrumental music)
It's amazing, because I was so surprised yesterday,
this morning, to see the finished pavilion.
It's beyond my imaginations.
This is a playful piece of architecture,
and the people can come and explore it, enjoy it,
and take what they want from it.
I really like this atmosphere
where people can freely behave as they like.
People do travel from all over the world
just to come and visit the pavilion.
It has that much of a standard in the architectural world.
Sou Fujimoto's pavilion
is all about architectural freedom.
But not every city in the world
can build whatever they like.
When your city is under threat
from one of the most devastating natural disasters
in the world,
construction becomes a whole different ballgame.
(exciting instrumental music)
This is Rincon Tower, a new high-rise apartment complex
in Downtown San Francisco.
Construction Manager Dave Thompson
has just 26 months to build this 50-story tower
in one of the world's most dangerous earthquake zones.
The building is a concrete construction.
It'll be 550 feet tall, 53 levels.
There will be 299 apartments.
(tense instrumental music)
San Francisco lies just 16 kilometers
from one of the biggest earthquake faults in the world.
When the last big one hit in 1906,
it destroyed over 28,000 buildings in the city.
So today, Dave and his team face a dual challenge:
bringing the project in on time and on budget
while at the same time preventing a 1906-style disaster.
California and San Francisco
have building codes and seismic codes.
All the buildings in San Francisco that are new,
that are being built,
all are designed to meet those codes and criteria.
Earthquake protection is built
into every stage of construction at Rincon Hill.
And leading the race into the sky is the concrete core,
the central backbone of the building
and Rincon Hill's main line of defense against a quake.
The concrete core is the epicenter of the structure.
All of the structural stability originates from there.
All the different movement that gets applied to the building
from seismic events all ends up in the core
and gets distributed into the foundation from the core.
To provide maximum stability
Rincon's core is packed
with over 1,500 tons of steel reinforcing bar...
and poured with high-strength concrete.
Five stories below the core, the concrete floors
or decks of the building are constructed.
But staying on schedule while constructing this structure
is a daily challenge, and it all comes down to efficiency.
Right here on this site we're doing a three-day cycle
with our concrete structure, and that's pretty unusual.
Okay, coming up.
(chatter on radio)
Every time we come up a floor,
they also come up and build the floor below us,
and we're just following each other.
Because the core will act
as the main structural support during an earthquake,
the decks are tightly locked into it
with concrete-encased reinforcing steel.
The task of pouring a staggering 762 tons of concrete
every three days falls to Alan Olson, senior superintendent.
What we're doing right now is we're placing the concrete.
The concrete is getting dumped into the pump
at the ground level.
It's getting pumped up 28 stories as we speak.
You can see it hitting the deck right now.
Each floor pour is a race against the clock.
From the time the trucks leave the plant
eight kilometers away, the team has only 90 minutes
before the concrete sets and dries.
We've got one shot to get this right. One time.
There is no second chances
when you're pouring a concrete deck.
The second time is gonna cost you big money.
But as concrete floods the deck,
Dan Murphy, an electrical foreman, spots a faulty connection
right in the path of the concrete workers.
The electrical foreman just noticed
that one of his conduits came disconnected
from the junction box there, so he's reconnecting it.
It must be fixed, but if it takes too long,
it could put the entire floor pour at risk.
Once the concrete starts flowing,
I don't want to stop it until we're completely done.
The worst-case scenario
is that the concrete becomes too hard to pour,
getting stuck in the pipes that pump it up the building.
It takes a lot of pressure.
It's coming up 28 stories high.
It'll blow the whole system out,
and it can be very dangerous,
just like shrapnel flying everywhere.
You don't want to hold the concrete pour up,
so you want to get in
if you identify that there's a problem.
Get in, fix it quickly,
so that they can continuing pouring concrete.
It's just when you see this many guys standing around
waiting for you to fix something as simple as a broken pipe.
Sorry, guys.
You got a lot of guys waiting on you.
In the nick of time
electrician Dan manages to fix the problem.
Yeah, I just cut out the broke part, glue a new piece in.
That's why they pay me the big bucks, man.
And the cables are buried forever
under the concrete.
(dramatic instrumental music)
The last stage of Rincon's construction
is the installation of the building's windows,
called the curtain wall, or skin.
Mark Herrera is the superintendent
in charge of the operation.
The panel's pulled out from that mobile crane
that's up above, then dropped down to the floor
that they're working with in its fixed position.
To survive an earthquake
a building needs two conflicting attributes:
enough strength to stay standing but enough flexibility
to move with the vibrations of the earth.
In San Francisco, given our history with earthquakes,
the seismic activity we have in this region,
it's very important that the system
have a certain amount of flexibility
to allow for that building to move.
An earthquake would shatter
conventional windows, so instead of being secured tightly,
each curtain wall panel is hung from an individual hook
and can move up to 2.5 centimeters to the left, right,
up, and down without being damaged.
The panels will allow for some shifting
in the event of an earthquake.
By combining efficient construction techniques
with state-of-the-art design,
Dave and his team are staying way ahead of the curve.
It's a phenomenal feat.
It's going off like clockwork here.
It takes a whole team to be able to get a structure going
at this pace, and this team is doing a great job.
(soft electronic music)
In our world's biggest cities
nothing stands still for long.
And as new buildings rise, old ones fall,
creating a constant cycle of change.
In a city as old and as crowded as London,
demolition is often the crucial first stage
of any new construction project.
Old cities, especially London, are limited for space,
so to get something new in, more often that not
you have to demolish something.
In the last five years
over 200 older buildings have been demolished
to make way for new development
in London's vibrant East End.
Today, Dave Strzelecki and his team
will add this 1960s office block to the list.
(truck rumbling)
But demolishing a five-story building in Central London
in just five weeks is far from straightforward.
That'll do for now.
Within 150 meters of the building is a school,
a busy road, and hundreds of residential homes.
If we were out in an open field,
it would be straightforward.
The challenge of demolition in a city
is that you've got a lot of people
in very close proximity to what you're doing.
With explosives out of the question,
this demolition comes down to the power of man
and his small machines.
The machine are two-and-a-half ton machines.
They got breakers on the front,
which they munch the concrete.
So, they're ideal for the job, for this job.
The building will be deconstructed
floor by floor from the roof down.
So the first problem is how to get five tons of machine
20 meters up in the air.
That's a job for Dan Watts and his 48-ton crane.
(tense music)
With hundreds of passersby only a few meters away
and a school playground next door,
this lift is fraught with danger.
Worst case scenario is I could have the machine
halfway up in the air up there,
the ground could give way,
and this would go straight through the building.
(chatter on radio)
Dan's job becomes more complex
as soon as the digger is lifted off the ground.
[Crewman On Radio] Keep going, keep going.
He relies on a banksman,
a radio operator who is closer to the action
to tell him to move left, right, up or down.
(chatter on radio)
This is I can't see the machine.
The person who's directing me, the banksman,
I'm in his hands.
Slowly to your left a little bit.
Slowly to your left.
I'm like a puppet.
I can't guess, I can't assume,
'cause that's how accidents happen.
[Banksman On Radio] Turn to your left.
Turn to your left please.
Hold it there. Hold it there.
(indistinct radio chatter)
(anxious music)
Keep going.
After a tense few minutes,
the digger finally lands on the roof.
[Banksman On Radio] And down on the chains, please.
Down on the chains.
No matter how matter times you've done it,
once the machine or anything like that is over there,
there is still a sense of relief
when it's down and it's all done.
But the rest of the gang's work
is only just beginning.
Deconstructing a building piece by piece
involves almost as much work as putting one up.
Steve needs to know exactly what holds
this structure together or risk his team's safety.
The problems are, because we're doing
this particular building floor by floor,
we have to get an assessment on the floors,
i.e. the concrete depths, what reinforcing's in 'em.
If we don't do the assessment of the floors,
that roof could collapse.
Steel props support each floor
below the demolition work,
improving the stability of the building.
We can't blast it, literally
because we're in a very tight situation here
with residents and everything.
It's not done in a day, but a building of this size,
two to three weeks and we can put it on the ground.
(exciting instrumental music)
A week into demolition and Dave Strzelecki
and his team are making good progress.
So we're now in the process
of taking down the walls on this floor, the fourth floor,
before we break through the slab again
and drop down onto the floor below.
(machinery chiseling)
These specialized diggers have their limits.
Because the city is right on their doorstep,
the construction workers must carry out
part of the demolition by hand.
You can't just go crashing about the place
and have anything falling out onto the scaffold.
So we have to use manual work as well
to make sure that we can control that.
Specially-trained metalworkers
follow behind the excavators and dismantle the steel beams.
We cut the steelwork and ease it down,
using a technique called hinge cutting it.
This brings it down in a very controlled manner, slowly,
and it ensures it comes within the job.
(welders hissing)
We're sat on the fourth floor.
Another week's time we'll be another floor down.
That's what we're hoping, a floor a week.
So, four weeks time, we'll be at ground level,
no building left, ready for the developer
to come along and put something new in.
(light percussive music)
Amidst the mass of concrete and steel
that make up a city, parks provide an essential green oasis
for residents to relax and unwind.
But as populations increase and space is limited,
finding and creating new parkland
is more and more challenging.
New York is the densest urban area in the United States,
and here local residents have come up
with an innovative way to maximize green space.
We're standing on the High Line.
The High Line is an old, elevated railroad
that we turned into a park.
This was the industrial part of New York,
and so it was a freight train
that serviced all the factories and warehouses
in this part of Manhattan.
But as lorries took over
the transportation of goods in the '60s and '70s,
the line was eventually abandoned.
It wasn't until the 1990s that Robert decided to work
to save the line from demolition.
(calm electronic music)
When I first came up here,
that's when I really fell in love,
because it was this rusty, old relic,
and there was a mile and a half of wildflowers
running right through the middle of the city.
It just felt like this forgotten piece of New York.
He saw a unique opportunity
to construct a new type of park.
Green space is critical in a city like New York.
We just have so much hardscape, so many people.
There's no more unused space in Manhattan
to create parks, so you have to be creative,
you have to look at spaces that had other uses.
The space was redesigned
to connect the city to nature and to its past,
making the old railway line
one of the centerpieces of the design.
We wanted to put the tracks back,
because we wanted to remind people what this was.
This was a working railroad.
I see kids all the time sort of standing on the tracks,
and I think they're just imagining
a train running right through their neighborhood.
The planting was designed
to recreate that kind of wild landscape
that was originally growing up here.
This unique green space
has transformed this residential area.
The High Line is a place
where people want to live near, work near, shop near.
Last year we had over four million visitors,
so it's really become not just a tourist attraction,
but it's also a real place for New Yorkers.
The High Line's success in New York
has inspired a whole new approach to park architecture.
Now people from all of the world are using it as a model
for how to reclaim old industrial spaces.
It's about keeping some of that history
and some of that past while creating new open spaces.
(upbeat jazz music)
As our cities expand upwards and outwards
to accommodate population growth,
some people are finding their perfect spaces
not on the ground but under it.
(intriguing music)
30 meters under the city of Stockholm,
a Cold War nuclear bunker has been transformed
into a modern-day Bond villain's lair.
Deep underneath the city of Stockholm
a very modern safe house has been constructed.
Well, you can trust this space.
You know it's very safe. You know nobody can come in.
An underground cavern protecting something
so important it can withstand a hydrogen bomb.
You're about 30 meters below the ground,
and it's granite, it's solid rock.
Designed to protect the most modern
of 21st century assets: our internet data.
In today's cities computer data
is almost as important as electrical power,
making the world's 500 billion gigabytes of data
worth more money than almost anything else on Earth.
In a modern city, everything that you do,
it's so interconnect with the internet.
It contains so much.
It contains banking transaction, it contains communication,
it contains basically everything.
But far from floating in an invisible cloud,
this information is stored in specialized facilities
all around the world.
This room have place for about 8,000 servers,
and out of these servers there are various businesses.
There are small business, big business,
banks, government installations.
We provided the technical facility for the WikiLeaks
during the operation of the Cablegate.
The core of the WikiLeaks business
was located in this facility.
One of these servers in this particular rack is WikiLeaks.
It is from this box that all the stuff
that was cabled out through the world was coming from.
(intriguing instrumental music)
If this data were suddenly lost,
bank accounts could empty,
and a city's infrastructure systems could collapse,
causing complete chaos.
It is Jon Karlung's job to make sure that doesn't happen.
It's critical to uphold this system
to place it in a secure environment.
When Jon and his team stumbled
upon a disused nuclear bunker
right in the middle of the city
they knew they had found the right place
to build a data safe house.
This facility was built in 1943
as a part of a crucial defense for Stockholm.
In the Cold War it was redesigned as a nuclear shelter.
But building in a bunker is no easy task,
as architect Albert France-Lanord found out.
It's a cave, it's rock, it's granite rock,
so there is no straight line, there is no existing drawing.
Albert decided to stick with the bunker theme
and design a modern version of a well-known
underground space: a Bond villain's lair.
We realized very quickly with the client
that we had the same passion for sci-fi movies...
a lot of different old ones, Bond as well of course.
To expand the original bunker
the team spent two years blasting through
4,000 cubic meters of solid granite.
You're not building something;
you're deleting from it to create space.
So it's totally the opposite
of what architecture normally is.
Huge, 40-centimeter-thick steel doors
provide the only entrance to the outside world.
In the center's control room
workers are surrounded by hydroponically-grown plants,
lights that change according to the time of day,
and smoking waterfalls.
I wanted the cave, the rock, to be dominant,
but then the man comes inside this alien world
with water, with light, with plants
and kind of starts its own life inside this rock.
(intriguing instrumental music)
Despite these secure surroundings
there's one problem that could seriously damage
the bunker's data: a power cut.
Europe has seen a 20% jump in demand for power since 1990,
leading to an increased number of electrical blackouts.
All the servers, the computers down here,
are dependent on electricity.
If the power disappears,
the hard drives on those computers would stop working,
so you will have a malfunctioning of the live systems.
Losing power here is not an option,
so the team have brought in these two-ton,
specialized German submarine generators,
programmed to take over minutes after a power cut.
One generator like this
is enough to power about 50 to 100 normal houses.
Since it's hard to know when power may fail,
Kristian Torryn and Thomas Johannson
carry out monthly tests to keep the generators ready
to react at a moment's notice.
We're gonna make a test run
just to be secure that we are working.
We really must do it.
(intense electronic music)
(machine whirring)
Our cities' insatiable need for information
is fueling a worldwide construction boom
of data centers, and nuclear bunkers
or military installations, safe houses from a different era,
make the perfect home
for one of our most valuable modern day assets.
We don't really need these spaces anymore.
It makes sense to reuse them somehow and use them for data.
(soft electronic music)
The world's cities are a patchwork
of the historical and modern,
where new layers of civilization
are built directly onto the old.
In London, the city's 2,000-year history
plays an important part in almost every new urban project.
This is the Crossrail development,
a brand-new, 118-kilometer train line,
the biggest construction project in Europe.
We have a total of around 40 construction sites
across the project.
It's a big number, especially when you're spread out
in all these different, busy areas.
To build the first completely new
underground train line in 30 years,
the Crossrail team are excavating down over 40 meters
to construct four brand-new tunnels.
And by digging so deep,
this team is uncovering a unique window on the city's past.
So whenever we're excavating a big area on the site,
we always make sure that the archeologists are involved.
Jay Carver is the lead archeologist
working across the entire Crossrail project.
The depth of deposit in London is up to nine meters deep
from the current ground surface, so a number of the sites
that we're building on for Crossrail
coincide with very important archeological deposits.
(intriguing music)
This week construction has stopped
on a section of the Farringdon station site,
so that archeologists can investigate
what appears to be the remnants of a building.
We're right in the middle of the Eastern Ticket Hall
Crossrail construction site,
and behind me the archeological contractor,
Museum of London Archeology,
are excavating a fairly small area in this site.
(machinery clattering)
Because the whole construction site
cannot come to a standstill,
building work continues all around the archeologists,
and the time to record the finds is limited.
We're only here a very short time.
It's really finish by the end of the day.
It can be quite difficult,
especially when you have a crane lifting machine
over our head.
It's a bit of a compromise to try and get the work done
as quickly as possible and as well as possible.
(soft percussive music)
All finds from the Crossrail sites
are recorded and cleaned in a laboratory
at the Museum of London.
Nick Elsdon is the project manager for the museum.
What we've got here is a selection of finds
from the earlier work on this site.
The finds from the Crossrail project
run the gamut of the centuries,
from a Roman horseshoe...
You can see it's very different from a modern horseshoe.
There's a solid iron plate underneath
to protect the horse's hoof.
To a 16th century ice skate.
There's these wonderful stories
of when it froze in the winter,
Londoners would tie cattle bones to their feet
and shoot along on poles.
And you can see the flat on the bottom
where it's been worn by contact with the ice.
The most personal finds are two leather shoes.
This one is obviously an adult shoe from the 16th century,
and another, looks so small,
it's almost certainly a child's shoe.
These shoes would have been worn by people
who certainly would have been walking around here
and perhaps living in the area at that time.
(intense instrumental music)
By tying together the future and the past
of large swaths of London,
the Crossrail project is setting a new precedent.
I think London is a city
that's always appreciated and looked after its heritage.
Not only are we building a project for future generations;
we're also exposed with a great opportunity
of uncovering London's history.
(passionate orchestral music)
Thousands of years of construction
have created our greatest cities.
And these crowded hubs of civilization continue to evolve.
Old buildings fall as new towers rise.
New transport links are created
as architectural masterpieces are preserved.
And behind it all is an army of architects, builders,
and engineers who work day and night to make it all happen.
One thing is for sure: this myriad of buildings, parks,
roads, and train lines tell the story of our civilization:
how we live, how we work, and who we are.
(passionate orchestral music)