Sagrada Família’s Magnificence Revealed in the Geometry of Gaudí’s Details
With its rickrack bell towers and spires, La Sagrada Família loomed like a spiny-horned prehistoric species. The cathedral sprouted from the center of Barcelona, and its towers could be seen from high points almost anywhere in the city. Inside, visitors tumbled into the cylinder of a kaleidoscope as the cathedral’s Modernist stained-glass shapes refracted red, green, yellow and blue and splashed new hues onto the floor, walls and vaulted ceilings.
La Sagrada Família—the basilica of the Holy Family—is Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí’s most enduring work. A colossus not yet complete but abuzz with cranes, tarps and scaffolding, the creation implores present-day architects and craftsmen to implement the creator’s designs despite Gaudí’s passing nearly a century ago.
Already 100 years in construction but still an unduplicated work of vision, Sagrada Família’s sandcastle-colored façade lurked behind the subway exit steps and stopped awestruck non-locals in their tracks. I felt deeply apologetic toward the commuting Catalans on behalf of the world’s tourists who slowed foot traffic around the basilica’s perimeter as they stretched selfie sticks into service.
More than three decades had passed since my collegial Intro to Architecture course when I’d first heard about Gaudí’s in-progress Sagrada Família. Mid-1980s photos showed a few spires and two partially completed facades of a mostly roofless structure. I thought it strange, remarkable really, not only that construction and financing continued but that the desire to move ahead with such a grand plan, some 48,000 square feet to welcome 8,000 worshipers, still lived on. Who does that today? Gaudí’s vision must be something special.
The Wrongness of Right Angles
What Salvador Dalí was to Surrealism, Antoni Gaudí was to Modernism. Two of Catalonia’s greatest creative minds.
Gaudi’s approach to building design was largely void of right angles. Geometry was king: u-shaped parabolas and elliptical hyperbolas fashion patterns based on swirling, cornerless forms and orbs.
Brilliantly colored tile, usually broken in pieces and reassembled into unsquared patterns, was his trademark surfacing technique. A devout Catholic, he was a naturalist who believed these elements were conceived by God. He incorporated nature and animals into design. Nature had no right angles, he reasoned. And he would make Sagrada Família to be the world’s most monumental three-dimensional storybook of Jesus Christ. And yet visitors of every belief, or lack thereof, find inspiration and something grand in Gaudí’s great cathedral. If not the message of religion, the structure, the art, the color and shapes tell wondrous stories even in their simple existence.
Setting the stage for his best-known work, Antoni Gaudí anticipated the need for his tireless devotion to structurally complete the most representative and magnificent pieces of his puzzle before his death and commit the rest to detailed paper renderings. Of the three grand façades he designed to depict the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ—Nativity, Passion, Glory—first he completed the rugged woodland Nativity façade—the side that can be seen on the approach from the city’s center—to convey the joy of believers in the birth of Jesus. Encrusted with vines, leaves and botanicals, the carvings emphasized the jubilation in framing the religious figures connoting the timeline to the birth of Christ. So dense and flowing was the figural storytelling the sculptural treatment is sometimes is referred to as melting wax. Just above the manger scene rose a cave-like earthen teepee Gaudí incorporated to connect with Catalonia’s most important pilgrimage sites, Monserrat in the mountains Northwest of Barcelona and the home of one of the most famous Black Madonnas.
In addition to penning even the most minute details in the blueprints for the interior and the exterior—even for how the sculpture work should look or the tone it should convey—Gaudí left detailed notes with instructions to future architect generations to figure out how to complete his proposed, complex construction using the optimal techniques of their modern day.
Gaudí’s design intended four bell towers to emerge from each of three facades, a dozen total, to signify Christ’s apostles. Every number had a meaning. He famously said he calculated everything. He ascertained the completion of one of the bell towers built above the Nativity façade to leave no guesswork for the appearance of those remaining. Gaudí’s signature jigsaw puzzle tile work ornamented the spires and finials, bursting out of the tower tip like glistening fruit baskets of oranges, limes and grapes. Visitors could practically reach out the slats of the bell towers (pictured below) and touch the massive mosaics when climbing inside.
Tree Tops Made of Buttons, Meringue
Geometry as art ruled the nave, the signature spot of the cathedral interior.
The U-shaped and flattened elliptical shaped arches of the upper ceiling vault billowed with butane-torched meringue, trimmed to fit with pinking shears. Anchoring ceiling medallions looked like vintage buttons arranged among the tufting. Or were they shards of ivory glued into a three-dimensional array with a hot glue gun? Certainly, Gaudí’s successors used folded triangles of paper, trimmed with scissors and uncreased, to pattern a starting point for the actual construction. Supporting this hypnotizing sky-high canopy, 56 fluted pillars of brown clay, gray granite and dark-gray basalt gently twisted as they ascended (pictured below). Each branched into four smaller pieces to mimic the shape of a tree.
Time melted away shuffling from spot to spot to observe the different light patterns. It was easy to meditate a day away.
Miraculous Mind of a Modest Man
In the level below the basilica, the museum told the nuts and bolts part of the story, showcasing some of Gaudí’s original drawings and plaster model recreations. Many were damaged or lost in 1936 during the Spanish civil war, but most fascinating to see were the models of how he visualized his geometry-based arch system upside down. He draped wire or string from the ceiling and weighed it down with little cloth sacks of sand at exact intervals to indicate where the structure supports or the apex of the spires would be. Mirrors flat below the aerial models reflected how spires and arches would look, downside up when constructed. Also in the museum was a windowed view into Gaudí’s workshop, with a bed tucked in the corner where he would sleep most nights in his final years after leaving his home at Park Güell, the parkland community he had designed. Gaudí often lived onsite while his design work was under construction. Crammed with plaster and wood carved pieces and sculptures, finials and ornamentation, the workshop was still in use.
Though his masterpieces were well known, Gaudí led a modest, low-profile life. A Catalan nationalist proponent, he always spoke Catalan, though he was also fluent in Spanish, French and much Italian. He ate for sustenance, not food enthusiasm, and usually snacked on dried fruits and nuts, which he stowed in his pockets. He kept a handful of close friends but was physically recognized by few people. Energized by his faith, Gaudí visited church daily. On his way to Mass in 1926, he was struck by a tram. Without identification at the time and thought to be homeless, the 73-year-old Gaudí was transported to the hospital, where he received only basic aid. By the time the rector of Sagrada Família discovered what had happened and identified Gaudí at the hospital, more extensive lifesaving measures were too late.
Catalans honored their great native son turning out by the thousands for his funeral cortege, according to Spanish art historian Daniel Giralt-Miracle’s Essential Gaudi. Architectural students shouldered his casket from the hospital, up La Rambla to the Cathedral of Barcelona where they placed it on the high alter. Following Mass, the procession escorted him home aboard a horse-drawn carriage to La Sagrada Família.
For 43 years Gaudí worked on Sagrada Família, his sole project in his final years. Gaudí is buried in the crypt. As the design world debates whether or not the portions of the basilica that have materialized since Gaudí’s death truly reflect his aesthetic, construction of Sagrada Família progresses. The landmark is 70 percent complete and finally nearing completion, projected for 2026, the 100-year anniversary of Gaudí’s death.
Visitor tips: I found it valuable to have purchased the special entry passes online in advance, with separate timed tickets to enter the towers. I found the time well spent rumbling around inside of them. We saved time not standing in the entrance lines and only had to queue briefly once in the gate to pick up our audio guides.