Building the Future: Story, Cast and Series Facts

Story and premise

Building the Future is about humankind's phenomenal ingenuity in engineering and shaping the world around us. Each program focuses on a simple human need - shelter or water, energy or safety - and explores how that basic requirement has led to some of the most incredible, awe-inspiring achievements of our species. We will take the viewer on journeys around the globe to see the projects that seem to defy the laws of physics or constraints of climate. And we will move through time to marvel at what was achieved centuries, even millennia, ago by our ancestors. However epic the scale of construction, however mind-boggling the technological statistics, humans are the heart. We will see every project through a personal lens - an archaeologist uncovering an ancient wonder, an engineer grappling with present-day problems and dangers, a designer dreaming of the future. And we will never forget that nature has a habit of fighting back - the possibility of failure is always present, and the higher we build, the harder we fall. This is not just a story of success ... Our planet has often brutally let us know that we have overstepped the mark.

Series details

• Title: Building the Future
• Format: Documentary
• Language: English
• Premiere date: 2007-06-10
• Final broadcast date listed: 2007-06-17
• Status in TVmaze: Ended
• Network listed by TVmaze: Discovery
• Network country: United States
• Typical episode runtime: 60 minutes
• TVMaze ID: 40317
• IMDb ID: tt1819833
• TVDB ID: 80230

Seasons in the TVmaze catalogue

• Season 1: premiered 2007-06-10; final listed air date 2007-06-17; episode order: 4.

Source and licence

Adapted from Building the Future on TVmaze. The synopsis is reproduced as plain text; catalogue facts, cast and season records are selected and reformatted. This adapted text is available under CC BY-SA 4.0, following the TVmaze API licence. Network and web-channel credits identify the service listed in this source; they do not establish current streaming availability.