One of my favourite tv shows is Grand Designs with Kevin McCloud. He is a British architect who follows around people who make innovative houses (for ten years or however long it takes) from self-regulating eco houses made from old tyres to living under an arch brick bridge. You learn so much about triple glazed windows which are absolutely necessary in European climatic conditions, and revolutionary structural design. People want to live in crazy spaces, like in a hole in a hill, or a entirely glass building, and hire boat craftsman to make staircases. They all have enormous bank accounts of course, so they can dream ridiculously impractical and resource-draining things. Sometimes modern, sometimes traditional.

Sometimes its not so beautiful, but amazingly pompous and over-indulgently crass, but fascinating as a train wreck. Its awesome, architecture. Where art and science and craft meet people and space and life.

He has a new program called Kevin McCloud's Grand Tour, which he follows in the line of priveleged British squires in making a grand tour of Europe to get a taste of new experiences and sights.

Genoa architecture

The Palladian principle of designing by perfect proportion, as a reference to the Virituan Man.

Villa Pisani is a beautiful theatre stage with an optical illusion only 10m deep.

He's always witty and makes wonderful analogies for the layperson to understand architecture - like jumping on roof tiles in the form of an arch to demonstrate their structural integrity.. until they fall apart, or spreading vegemite on crackers just as how the walls will cement together, using playing cards to show how venetian walls are built with only two supporting sides and a roof, using tooth picks and ganache to mimic how Venice was built on mud slats along a canal. I just have so much respect for the architect craft. Last year I interviewed an American architect, and the connections their mind make in considering space is so awesome.

Apart from staring at the walls and floors, if that should ever bore you, he visits Parma and stands among million dollar valued cheese racks, eats frog legs, participates in the Carnivale, and is always wandering down dark cobbled alleyways to talk to prostitutes, about historical vices of course.

The scenes in this series are really breathtakingly beautiful, and will make you want to undertake your own grand tour. And McCloud is the perfect British gentleman to take you there.

Somehow I love architecture, yet I don't think I can ever aspire to it. Its like being an astronaut for me hah.