This is the Queen's Stepwell in Gujarat, India, built nearly 1,000 years ago.
It is beautiful, but it isn't unique — India is filled with hundreds of stepwells just like it.
Here is the story of the world's most extraordinary underground architecture...
Water management was (and remains) one of the biggest challenges for any human civilisation.
When you have a large group of people living in one place you need to provide water for drinking, bathing, washing, and the irrigation of crops.
The only question is: how?
In India, sometime between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, there arose a very special way of managing water: stepwells, known variously as baoli, bawri, or vav.
They were a solution to the problem of water supply in arid regions without consistent rainfall.
Why are they called stepwells? It's in the name.
Like all wells, they are essentially just holes down to the water table, which is where the earth is saturated with water.
The difference is that they incorporate steps or terraces leading down to the bottom.
The first stepwells were relatively simple — perhaps something like this, the Adi Kadi Vav, carved straight into the rock.
But they rapidly became larger, more complex, and more ambitious. Many go five storeys deep into the earth; some go even further than that.
Stepwells have several ingenious design features.
In order to deal with the inconsistent weather of regions which were dry for most of the year and then soaked in the rainy season, they act as cisterns which fill to the brim during heavy rainfall — water storage.
And, by virtue of their steps, they allow the water to be accessed at any time, no matter how high or low its level is.
This is Toorji's Stepwell, built in the 1740s, seen at two different points in the year.
But what started as a way of effectively accessing water became something more, and one of the world's most extraordinary architectural traditions was born.
These stepwells were a crucial part of everyday life; their architecture soon reflected this importance.
And the design of stepwells evolved to meet the challenges of their changing use.
Some of them incorporated covered galleries to provide relief from the heat of sun, along with space to shelter for travellers, traders, and pilgrims resting from their journeys.
The stepwell became a definitive form of public architecture, open to and used by all, a universal feature of daily life and a hive of social activity.
They were usually funded by wealthy patrons, who sought the prestige of providing such an important civic monument.
In many cases these stepwells became full-blown temples, their walls adorned with sculptures of the gods and goddesses, their columns and chambers lined with elaborate ornamentation, prayer niches, and shrines.
Sites of spiritual as well as functional and social significance.
Or in the case of stepwells built by India's Islamic dynasties, where representational art (depicting humans or living creatures) was avoided, they were nonetheless decorated with sumptuous and intricate stonework.
That they were functional places did not preclude beauty.
To build a stepwell was a huge challenge; this is underground architecture, after all, fraught by the risk of collapse under pressure from the earth pushing in from either side.
And yet they stand, centuries on. Stepwells aren't only beautiful; they are triumphs of engineering.
This combination of factors — the necessity for providing water, the engineering challenge, the social importance, the opportunity to create something beautiful — prompted some of the most striking, unusual, and impressive architecture anywhere in the world, as at Chand Baori.
This is architecture which invites us to look *down* rather than — as with most buildings — up.
We see into the earth, as the structure opens below us; no wonder stepwells have been called inverted temples.
Though, within them, we can also look up — not to the ceiling, but to the sky and the sun.
There are thousands of stepwells in India, but many of them have been lost to time, silted up and buried, collapsed, or simply forgotten.
Though indispensible for centuries, they were made obsolete by modern plumbing and water infrastructure, and thereafter abandoned.
Still, their social and spiritual importance was irreplaceable, and there are stepwells which have endured as temples and sites of worship.
Not to mention those that remain central parts of their community, whether as tourist hotspots or places for a swim!
There's nothing quite like the stepwells of India, a type of underground architecture which combined the vital function of providing water with masterful engineering, majestic architecture, delightful ornament, and social and spiritual purpose.
Public architecture at its finest.
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But it was basically an accident — and he didn't even know about it...
As with the other continents, it isn't completely clear how the Americas got their name.
But the most widely accepted theory is that America was named after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who travelled there twice in the late 1490s and early 1500s.
This Amerigo Vespucci was born on 9th March 1454 in Florence, northern Italy, the home of the Renaissance.
He knew members of the famous de' Medici Family, and through them ended up working in Seville, southern Spain, where he may have worked with Christopher Columbus.
Mont-Saint-Michel in France is one of the most famous places in the world.
You've seen thousands of photos of it... but what is Mont-Saint-Michel? Who built it? And when?
This is a brief history of the world's strangest village...
First — where is it?
Mont-Saint-Michel (which is the name of the island, the village, and the abbey) is a tidal island off the coast of Normandy, in northern France.
"Tidal" means that it is surrounded by sea or by land depending on the tides.
Legend says that during the 8th century a bishop called Autbert of Avranches had a dream in which the Archangel Saint Michael told him to build a shrine on the island.
The Archangel Michael, who defeated Satan in battle, was a popular saint at the time.
This unusual house in Turin was built 123 years ago.
It's the perfect example of a kind of architecture unique to Italy, known as the "Liberty Style".
How to make ordinary buildings more interesting? The Liberty Style has an answer...
During the 1890s there was an artistic and architectural revolution in Europe: Art Nouveau.
It means "New Art" in French, and that's exactly what it was — a whole new approach to design, whether of buildings, furniture, clothes, sculpture, or crockery.
There were many genres of Art Nouveau, but what they had in common was a commitment to traditional craftsmanship, the embrace of new materials like iron, and a turn toward flowing designs inspired by nature.
Like the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels, designed by Victor Horta, from 1893:
It's by Grant Wood (most famous for American Gothic) and it's called The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.
Why does it look like that? Because Grant Wood had one of the most unusual styles in art history...
Grant Wood was born in 1891 in rural Iowa; ten years later the family moved to Cedar Rapids.
He worked at a metal shop, studied at arts and crafts schools in Minneapolis and Chicago, and then became a public school art teacher back in Cedar Rapids.
Humble beginnings.
In the 1920s, while working as a teacher, Wood made several trips to Europe, including a year studying at the Académie Julian in Paris.
There, like so many artists of his generation, he adopted a generic and basically unremarkable Impressionist style: