To we moderns, the people who built the great cathedrals of Europe are incomprehensible. After all, these were constructions which took centuries to build. Why, wonder generations brought up on a lifetime of instant gratification, would anyone work on a building which they, or even their grandchildren, never see finished? But then, we’re talking about a generation who were outraged that the French government would even spend money to rebuild a fire-gutted Notre Dame, rather than on welfare programs.
But to get an inkling of the mindset that would plant a sapling knowing they’d never see the tree, and lay a foundation knowing they’d never see the building, consider Antoni Gaudi’s magnificent Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona. It blew my mind when, as an art student, I first learned about this incredible, dream-like building, more properly known as the Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family, which began construction in the 19th century and still wasn’t finished.
That long wait may soon be over.
The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona will finally be finished in 2026, more than 140 years after construction started.
The construction of the last of six towers will mark the completion of the structure of the basilica.
9News
Gaudi’s masterpiece gives new meaning to Matthew Arnold’s evocative phrase, “dreaming spires”. Its lengthy construction time is not the only link it has to the soaring cathedrals of the past. It was a mistake, as the Surrealists did, to assume that Gaudi’s was a modern mind. Quite the reverse, as Robert Hughes wrote:
The Sagrada Familia was intended to be what its name says: a temple, where Catalans (and, Gaudi hoped, eventually the whole Catholic world) would converge to do penance for the sins of “modernity”.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, the Catholic church felt it was under siege from all those forces of atheism, scientism, disobedience and doubt that its hierarchy rolled together into the portmanteau word “modernism”. Huge rearguard actions were fought by Rome […]
What the church wanted was a new counter-reformation, based on an extreme ratcheting-up of cultic devotion to Jesus, Mary and the saints. Gaudi conceived his temple as a means to that end. It would be an ecstatically repressive building that would help atone for the “excesses” of democracy. “Everyone has to suffer,” he once told a disciple. “The only ones who don’t suffer are the dead. He who wants an end to suffering wants to die.”
Gaudi was 41 when he came to the Sagrada Familia project, which had in fact begun the year before, 1882. The original concept was a thoroughly traditional neo-Gothic design. Gaudi turned that on its head. He decided that the building would have 18 towers, each symbolising a different Biblical figure: the 12 apostles, the four evangelists, the Virgin Mary and Jesus. But his great inspiration was what he called the “Great Book”: nature.
Everything structural or ornamental that an architect might imagine was already prefigured in natural form, in limestone grottoes or dry bones, in a beetle’s shining wing case or the thrust of an ancient olive trunk.
Construction began in 1908. By 1925, only the crypt and the Saint Barnabas belltower were finished: the only part of the basilica Gaudi would see finished. He died the next year, after being struck by a tram. During the Spanish Civil War, leftist guerillas destroyed many of Gaudi’s plans and models. Current designs are based on surviving and reconstructed materials, as well as reimagined adaptations of the original.
What we have now is only a fragment of a dream. And yet its logic of construction, its sheer blazing inventiveness, removes it from the domain of fantasy and creates one of the world’s most sublime architectural spaces.
The Guardian
“The Chapel of the Assumption is expected to be finished in 2025 and the tower of Jesus Christ, in 2026,” the Sagrada Familia said in a statement announcing the publication of its 2023 annual report.
The tower of Jesus Christ will stand at 172.5 metres tall, and will be finished with a 17-metre-tall four-armed cross.
When complete, the Sagrada Familia will become the world’s tallest church, overtaking Ulm Minster in Germany.
9News
In a final nose-thumbing to modernity and its attendant bureaucracy, it was discovered in 2016 that construction had been going on “illegally” for 137 years. It was only in 2019 that a building permit was finally issued by Barcelona’s city council.
Caesar had finally rendered unto God that which was God’s.
