An overview of the architectural documentary on television - establishing typologies and analysing some exemplary texts.
The televised ‘architectural documentary’ is a difficult subgenre to define. It can incorporate monographic accounts of single buildings as well as documentaries in which architecture features as one element of more comprehensive historical or cultural investigations. It comprises numerous home-finding and makeover programmes, and monographs on the work of signature architects. This essay offers a survey of this range of approaches and of the ways of analysing and contextualizing elements of the built environment. Architecture is a prominent component in imaginative recreations of the past, such as Mary Beard’s insightful invocations of Pompeii and other classical sites.1 The forensic and imaginative investigation of archaeological sites is a kind of paradigm of teasing