La Plata is a city drawn on paper before it existed, laid out in the 1880s as the new capital of the province of Buenos Aires with a strict grid, diagonal avenues and a set of public buildings assigned in advance. The cathedral was part of that plan from the start, and it was intended to be immense. Built in exposed brick rather than stone, it follows the neo-Gothic manner of the period, with a long nave, high vaults, rose windows and a stained-glass programme that fills the interior with colour. The scale is European cathedral scale, transplanted to the flat country of the pampas and executed in the material the region could supply. Its history is also one of patience. Construction advanced through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the twin towers that complete the west front were only finished in the closing years of the twentieth, more than a hundred years after the first stone. A lift now carries visitors up one of them for a view over the geometry of the city below. Filmed in 4K, the programme suits strands on sacred architecture, urban history and the great building projects of the Americas.
