We're making a show about architecture.
The concept is simple: do for buildings what Planet Earth did for nature.
If you want to stay updated, enter your email address below:
You can watch our pilot episode here:
We're making a show about architecture.
The concept is simple: do for buildings what Planet Earth did for nature.
If you want to stay updated, enter your email address below:
You can watch our pilot episode here:
Everyone has an opinion on architecture because it's everywhere. And what most people believe is that the things we make — from buildings to benches — have become generic and boring. It all feels careless.
The most reliable way to go viral online is to show a simple side-by-side: an ornate gate next to a sterile one; a charming lamp post next to a utilitarian one.
There is mass discontent around the world, and it's only growing.
Despite being an inherently visual topic, no one has filmed this.
There is an emerging global movement without a name, a face, a voice, or a narrative world.
That's what The Modern World is.
We want to give that feeling a voice — articulating what millions of us feel, and exploring why and how it happened.
Our pilot episode — How Did The World Get So Ugly? — has more than 5.4 million views on a new YouTube channel.
Since uploading it, the channel has gained over 241,000 subscribers and 447,000 watch hours.
The single video has 378k likes and 23k comments.
A selection of comments left under the pilot.
The Modern World is a cinematic exploration of what humankind has built and designed in the past.
But the point isn't just to learn history. The point is to understand the present day through previous eras — and what they've left behind.
The show isn't really "about" the past. It's about getting to grips with, and improving, the twenty-first century. That's why it's called The Modern World.
The series is hosted by Sheehan Quirke, who built one of the fastest-growing non-celebrity Twitter accounts of all time.
He amassed 1.6 million followers on X in a short space of time with erudite-but-accessible takes on art, architecture, poetry, and history. He has 200,000 email subscribers, and recently published an audio series with Audible and a book with Penguin Random House.
Six episodes. Each investigates the spirit of a past era — and what it can teach us about right now. Filmed across five European countries: Italy, the UK, France, Germany, and Belgium, with New York City introduced in the final two episodes.
"How many things can you see, right now, that are the only one like that in the world?"
Medieval craftsmen put their personalities into everything they made. From the colourful Hospital of Beaune to a 600-year-old church carving of a monkey playing a dog as bagpipes, we discover a handmade world — and confront how standardised and mass-produced our own has become.
"The future will be better than the present; the present is better than the past. This is a radical idea. It didn't exist for most of history."
What if modernity actually started 500 years ago? In Italy we learn that belief in progress had to be invented — and that the Renaissance took most of its ideas from the distant past. A lesson in how history can solve modern problems.
"They were rich, so they spent their money on appearances, maybe too much. We're also rich, but we care less about appearances, maybe not enough."
From an 18th-century Scottish house shaped like a pineapple, to Baroque Germany, to libraries in Oxford and Edinburgh built like palaces. Why did past generations design their schools and civic spaces like temples — and why don't we?
"Why shouldn't people who work in factories also have a beautiful place of work?"
From train stations that look like cathedrals to factories designed as Egyptian temples and drainpipes shaped like dragons. The 19th century proves that any object — even a water tower — can be charming, interesting, and beautiful.
"For the first time, buildings could be designed with illumination in mind: the Architecture of the Night was born."
Doorbells shaped like flowers, metro entrances designed like dragonflies, and Art Deco spires inspired by machines and electricity. Crossing the Atlantic to the Chrysler Building, we see what optimism about the future once looked like.
"It is not the things we say, but the things we make, that reveal the truth about us."
Why is modern architecture like that? We trace it back to the first modernist houses in Germany, where the plain buildings we now take for granted were once futuristic. What was once an exception has become the rule — and we end with ideas for what the future might look like.
Everything in The Modern World is captured directly in-camera.
No animations. No stock footage. No archival photos. No illustrations. No Ken Burns effect.
We film the real thing, on location. If we can't get permission, we change the script. Our focus is finding locations that aren't well known — but should be — rather than retreading places everyone already recognises.
There is huge demand for a series like this.
Look at where the tourists go. They visit old cities. They go to museums. They take photos with old buildings. And yet, there hasn't been a definitive art / history / culture series for modern audiences since Kenneth Clark's Civilisation in 1969 — fifty-seven years ago.
That's a poverty of imagination, not a scarcity of demand. The Modern World is a show that three generations of one family can enjoy together: a rare topic that ignites real feeling while being entirely non-political. It speaks to something deeper than left vs. right squabbles — our universal need for beauty, charm, and wonder.
We've limited ourselves to a handful of European locations for season one. Europe alone could be a dozen seasons. It's easy to imagine seasons focused on Eastern culture, the ancient world, urban design, skyscrapers, or dedicated miniseries on America or Japan.
Chef's Table is a useful comparison: from 2015 to 2025, the franchise produced six main volumes and six spin-offs. The surface area for this series is endless, timeless, global, and all-encompassing — because we're talking about design, which is (by definition) everything in the man-made world.
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