Before the birth of CAD programs, the calculations needed for such a task were complicated or at best hit and miss. Working with his team, Gaudí devised a system of using photography to calculate the correct distortion required. First an object was either cast or copied faithfully. With the sculptures of the human figure the failure of the Opisso experiment had already ruled out casting directly from life. The finished lifesize plaster of a saint or an angel was therefore first recorded in a photograph. The photograph was then placed leaning back at the angle that corresponded to the height that the sculpture would be placed on the façade and then carefully re-photographed head on. The resulting image revealed the level of distortion required to make the final sculpture appear in perfect proportion. The legs needed to be longer, the head stretched, the midriff pulled out as if elastic, so that the viewer below would see the image in the correct proportions. It was a method that was fraught with problems, with the original model passing through many visual filters, from life to plaster, from photograph onto deliberately distorted photograph and finally back again to its new plastic reality. Hopefully, the scale of the image would also relate perfectly to the entire decorative ensemble of the façade. That was the idea. It was painstaking, costly and laborious. Particularly when you realise that this is really just the beginning of the process. Matamala and his team, working directly from the photograph, would set about creating what they hoped was a ‘perfectly’ distorted sculpture in plaster. The image was hoisted up, twenty or thirty metres into the final position, to await assessment by Gaudí. If deemed acceptable, it was carefully lowered down and faithfully copied in stone, to be raised once more and finally put in place.
Gaudí’s interest in the human figure was never just skin deep. Like the Philadelphian painter Thomas Eakins, who studied anatomy for years, Gaudí needed to understand what made the body stand up. For Gaudí the human figure represented God’s finest handiwork and could teach even an average architect an important lesson on structure and how to build. Obtaining a skeleton, Gaudí rewired the joints so that the skeleton could be positioned into various poses with appropriate gestures. Walls of mirrors were placed in a hexagonal format with a life model or the articulated skeleton placed in the middle, allowing the viewer to see around the figure from multiple viewpoints. A studio assistant might stand in as the suffering Christ hanging on the Cross, twisted in pain, and be observed carefully in the round. For Gaudí, attention to detail, although perhaps never noticed by the viewer, was an integral part of his honesty and his devotion to God. Perhaps, as was the practice with the seventeenth-century sculptures of the recumbent Christ by Gregorio Fernández, Gaudí also meditated on these images of suffering as a kind of psychological aid in coming closer to God.
All of these different techniques and specialities demanded that the Gaudí architectural practice at the Sagrada Família be divided into various zones.
In the grounds Mossèn Gil Parés, the parish priest, had built a house. On the floor above the priest’s rooms there were photographic studios, a large drawing studio, Gaudí’s hideaway office, which was filled floor to ceiling with models, drawings and a daybed, as well as a large room for maquettes and models, some on a scale of one to ten. In a separate area there were sculpture studios and stores for building equipment.
Gaudí was always working on two entirely different scales, ranging from the microscopic to the cosmic and from apparently insignificant details to the full projection of his gigantic church. Details on the Nativity façade demanded a special focus, particularly the complex iconography. Models of the façade gave the team direction even if at first sight it appeared chaotic to the untrained eye. However, although Gaudí was focusing almost exclusively on the Nativity façade, it was only a small part of the whole. In tandem, Gaudí was also drawing up plans for the entire Sagrada Família and creating detailed models that would be used in the future to complete the project. Work progressed at a steady pace. Construction had started on the Nativity façade in 1892; two years later the façade of the apse was finished and by 1899 the Rosary portal on the Nativity façade, with its depiction of the Orsini bomb, was also finished. It is not certain when it first dawned on Gaudí that he would never see the Sagrada Família completed, but in preparation for that eventuality he wanted to leave an accurate model for his successors to use as a guide.
By 1902, almost twenty years after inheriting the building project, Gaudí had finally finished his first wonderfully evocative depiction of how he wanted the Sagrada Família to look. Over the next twenty-four years it would go through many revisions and rethinks but essentially always remain the same. The smudged black-and-white charcoal drawing appeared to evoke sandcastles in the sky, rising up like a mysterious silhouette. The sfumato dreamscape fitted in perfectly with the symbolist aesthetic of its day.
If Gaudí’s exacting, often obsessive methodology was one obvious reason for the slow progress on the Sagrada Família, there were always further distractions.
While Gaudí worked on the Sagrada Família other work kept coming in. In 1900 he won his first and only gold medal – for the Casa Calvet, a neo-baroque townhouse that sat over the Calvets’ textile shop in Barcelona’s Eixample. Relatively sedate in comparison with Gaudí’s later work, the Casa Calvet’s exterior was decorated with cornucopias, swags of flowers and the mushrooms the late Sr Calvet had loved to pick. Today, in keeping with the gastronomic theme, the textile shop houses an excellent restaurant serving refined Catalan cuisine.
In 1898, the same year as he drew up plans for the Casa Calvet, Gaudí started work on Eusebi Güell’s utopian project for a textile factory, school and workers’ housing at the Colonia Güell, twenty kilometres west of Barcelona on the banks of the river Llobregat at Santa Coloma de Cervelló. Most of the project was passed over to his assistant Francesc Berenguer, but Gaudí reserved the workers’ church for himself.
At the Sagrada Família he had inherited Francisco de Paula del Villar’s crypt as a foundation on which to build. At the Colonia Güell he could start afresh on virgin soil. Gaudí’s design for the church, which was again left unfinished, gives us a unique window into what the Sagrada Família might have been had Gaudí won the commission before del Villar had planned the axis, settled the footprint and suggested the early neo-Gothic style.
The only part existing is Gaudí’s crypt, but it is an absolute masterpiece and his greatest work. Again, as with so many other projects, it fed back ideas into how the Sagrada Família was going to proceed. As a crypt it defies all expectations. Gaudí’s crypt is light, heavenly, a brilliant symphonic poem of meandering brick that teases the eye, rhymes, sings and breaks all the rules. In terms of architecture, it is Gaudí’s passport into the pantheon of the very select few. An hour spent in the Cripta Güell – with its stained-glass butterfly windows opened to the hot pine-scented wind – is utterly magical.
Out in the woods Gaudí’s team set up a research shed in which over the next ten years they perfected a highly elaborate catenary model with a system of hanging strings. Each string as it looped down had attached to it a little bag filled with shotgun pellets that represented an exact weight corresponding to the carefully calculated stress. Gaudí’s model, almost four metres tall, was in effect an analogue computer that acknowledged his acquaintance with Arab astrolabes perfected more than a thousand years earlier in Moorish Spain. Used as a method for calculating the correct inclination of columns to compensate for gravitational thrust, it proved a wonderful aid. It has to be seen to be believed, and most definitely also seen to be understood. For Gaudí, however, it had a far deeper resonance. Based on the theory of gravity, it suggested that in reality it had been designed in partnership with the Creator himself. It was a fascinating conceit. When the model was finally completed, it was photographed, the image flipped over and the arches could now rise skyward.
As his researches in Santa Coloma pressed on and the Sagrada Família needed constant attention, Güell added to the load by requesting he plan an entire estate, the Park Güell on the outskirts of Barcelona. From Palma de Mallorca, Bishop Campins required Gaudí’s advice on completely rethinking the Gothic cathedral, dismantling the choir to create a diaphanous space, and further design ideas. By 1904 Gaudí was already overseeing five major projects when Sr Batlló called on him to totally refurbish his townhouse on the Passeig de Gràcia.
The Casa Batlló’s shimmering façade is another of Gaudí’s triumphs. Working in tandem with his most gifted assistant, Josep Maria Jujol, he transformed a drab dwelling into a multicoloured riot of tiles, skull-shaped balconies and a roof silhouette representing a dragon, with the tiles doubling as the monster’s scales. Pierced through by a Christian cross, it alluded to Saint George – Catalonia’s patron saint – and the dragon. It was a delightfully entertaining example of nationalist propaganda.
In the interior of the house’s spacious piano nobile there is hardly a straight line to be found, as plaster, wood and tiles sweep the eyes through the rooms, passing a womb-shaped inglenook on into the salon, where a giant seems to have pulled the ceiling round into a spinning vortex. Despite the decor, the Casa Batlló is a wonderfully practical dwelling built for a family keen to display their daring modernity. It still looks revolutionary more than a century later.
The Batlló house led on immediately to the much larger commission for the Casa Milà, three blocks up the Passeig de Gràcia. Known as La Pedrera – the quarry – Gaudí’s corner development built for the dandy Mila and his wealthy wife Rosa has justifiably been declared a World Heritage Site. Over three years, 1906–9, La Pedrera slowly found its final shape, hidden from public gaze by a hoarding. When uncovered, it immediately sealed Gaudí’s reputation as the most outlandish, innovative, riotous revolutionary working in the Iberian Peninsula, if not the world. The cartoonists had a field day with its cave-like appearance, transforming this grotto deluxe into a home for reptiles and snakes or alternatively portraying it as a landing bay for Zeppelin airships or with the caped Richard Wagner looking up at the craggy edifice smouldering enviously in full Götterdämmerung mode. The wrought-iron balconies fashioned and beaten into shape by Jujol looked like seaweed washed up on the side of a cliff.
Just as Gaudí’s use of broken tiles in the trencadís technique had foreshadowed the invention of cubism, so too Jujol’s daring assemblage of welded steel prefigured the sculptures of Picasso, Anthony Caro and David Smith.
Once again Gaudí’s brilliant imagination had triumphed at the cost of being completely misunderstood. Behind the façade, or rather integral to it, was the concept of a spiritual pilgrimage up through its seven floors and its diaphanous attic and out onto the roof, where, accompanied by chimneys appearing as mutilated ghouls, the pilgrim could look out across the city of sin. La Pedrera was a giant rosary in stone that still carefully hides its mysteries from all but the most attentive eye.
The brilliance of La Pedrera put Gaudí in the dubious position of becoming the most fashionable, sought-after architect of the day. If he had chosen to capitalise on his fame, Gaudí might have built dozens of other buildings for Barcelona’s bourgeois elite illustrating his fascinating ongoing dialogue with natural forms. Fortunately for the Sagrada Família, La Pedrera was Gaudí’s last secular work. Pere Milà had finally lost patience. Battling the town hall on a daily basis to exempt La Pedrera from the strict ordinances set out for the development of the Eixample, and the ensuing fines, effectively drained all the remaining goodwill; Gaudí walked off site, vowing never to return. The rooftop sculpture of the Madonna flanked by angels was never put in place. There are many architectural critics who see that as a very good outcome. For Gaudí, however, La Pedrera without its rooftop Madonna had lost all its meaning and poignancy, and, most importantly, had been robbed of its redemptive power.
From Casa Milà it was a short walk to the Sagrada Família, and from the late summer of 1909 to his untimely death in 1926 Gaudí concentrated exclusively on his expiatory temple. There, at least, his refined religious temperament, now built on daily readings of the Bible and Dom Guéranger’s L’année liturgique, and fortified by daily confession, could focus exclusively on what he now saw as his magnum opus.
In 1905, Gaudí’s domestic life on the surface appeared more comfortable as he moved into the show house designed by his assistant Berenguer in the exclusive Park Güell. Living with his aged father Francesc meant, however, the joint task of caring for his dead sister’s daughter Rosita Egea, who as a chronic alcoholic sedated herself on a cocktail of bad wine and cough medicine. Their shared calvary transformed Gaudí into a committed enemy of all psychoactive substances, including coffee, tea, alcohol and tobacco. The idea that the Amanita muscaria – magic mushroom – domes on the Park Güell porter’s lodge are a coded admission of Gaudí’s hidden love for hallucinogens is laughable. Look carefully and you see that the telltale white spots that denote the deadly fungus fly agaric are upturned coffee cups.
Sadly, Gaudí’s father died within a year of moving into the Park Güell, at the age of ninety-three. It was now just Gaudí and Rosita living in their retreat, visited daily by nuns to clean and keep Rosita company, while the architect descended into the city to spend the day thinking through his elaborate plans for the Sagrada Família, as the model-makers laboured to create a 3D projection from which they could all proceed.
A visit to the Gaudí House Museum reveals the architect’s increasingly ascetic lifestyle. His bedroom is really a priest’s cell. The family diet and health regime inspired by Dr Kneipp, a founder of the naturopathic medicine movement, focused on fresh air, hydrotherapy and a sprinkling of salad and nuts. The only wine to pass Gaudí’s lips was when attending mass.
Gaudí’s paternalism, refined through his early cooperative experiments at Mataró and the Catholic workers’ retreat at Güell’s textile plant at Santa Coloma, would find their final expression at the community he was building at the Sagrada Família. Workers were strongly discouraged from taking their lunchtime break in the surrounding bars. Allotments were parcelled out for them to practise their husbandry skills and grow vegetables and tomatoes to take home to the family. Workers who had reached retirement age were, whenever possible, kept on in less strenuous roles, going round with water, running errands and anything else they could comfortably manage. In an age when the welfare state was a distant idyll, this must have provided support to many families.
Slowly the Sagrada Família was beginning to integrate itself into the everyday life of Barcelona. En route to its acceptance there were barriers to overcome. In 1903 Barcelona town hall had invited the young French urban planner Léon Jaussely to rethink Cerdà’s plan for the Eixample, which they felt had become outdated. Gaudí lobbied Jaussely to revise the street pattern around the Sagrada Família, carving away at the corners of surrounding blocks to create a star pattern that would heighten the impact of the temple’s imagined silhouette. Gaudí’s suggestions were both costly and perhaps too innovative, and didn’t make it to Jaussely’s final plan, submitted in 1907. In the same year Cardinal Casañas, Barcelona’s bishop, proposed that the crypt might be officially designated as a parish church under his jurisdiction. The move was diplomatically stalled, leaving the Sagrada Família with full autonomy.
Over the years Gaudí had received support in the press from the poet Joan Maragall, another Mestre en Gai Saber, who had hailed the Sagrada Família as integral to the identity of the growing metropolis. Not always entirely in tune with Gaudí’s philosophy, Maragall nevertheless called for people to donate and involve themselves in building this glorious church.
On site, work progressed, as always . . . at snail’s pace. In 1909, in keeping with the holistic concept of creating a Catholic community, a parish school was planned for the south-east corner of the central plot. Sunscreens were to be placed out in the playground where the pupils could learn to nurture and shade their individual plant pots, handed out to promote a sense of responsibility and develop a caring attitude to the natural world. The main building, a fantastically simple but elegant solution to the demands of working to a tight budget, was later described by Le Corbusier as one of the greatest buildings of the twentieth century. In its scale and humility, it is everything that the Sagrada Família is not. Devoid of ornament, the drama lies in the undulating roof that sweeps over the space in elegant waves of tile. It has been imitated since, most notably by Santiago Calatrava at the Ysios wine bodega in Laguardia in the Rioja and again in Dallas, Texas, with his mobile sculpture placed over a pool outside the Meadows Museum, the wonderful ‘Prado in the Prairie’. In fact, the legendary school building often overlooked by the visitor has been rebuilt twice, having suffered on two separate occasions from vandalism and fire. Like so many other spaces created by Gaudí – the attics in the Casa Batlló and the neighbouring La Pedrera, for instance, or the corridor in the convent of the Teresianas – the genius is found in their spare, stark and economical beauty.
Gaudí’s genuine sympathy with his workers and his ambition to create a community were best illustrated by his support for the Sagrada Família school.
If the Nativity façade appeared threatening, the school seemed immediately more approachable and human. It is probably the single reason that the Sagrada Família religious complex, by association, escaped the worst ravages of the riots that were soon to sweep through the city.
Since the Orsini explosives had been launched into the stalls of the Liceu back in 1893, Barcelona had been sitting on a ticking time bomb. Abject poverty and all the associated social ills had never gone away, providing the perfect conditions for increased anarchist activity. In June 1896 the Rubicon was crossed with the bombing in Barcelona of the Corpus Christi procession. The government’s response was quick and brutal, as five anarchists were rounded up and immediately executed. The cycle of repression rapidly escalated as more than 400 suspected anarchist sympathisers and Republicans were jailed and tortured in the castle of Montjuïc. In response, on 8 August 1897, the Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo travelled to the resort spa of Santa Águeda, in Mondragón in northern Spain, and assassinated the prime minister Cánovas del Castillo. The Spanish–American War in 1898 further exacerbated the problems of the poor as the streets filled with the returning wounded. The first years of the new century in Barcelona witnessed a dramatic increase in industrial unrest followed by further repressive clampdowns. The Bill of Jurisdictions in 1906 legitimised the introduction of martial law under specific conditions. To add to this volatile cocktail, conscripts were called up in Barcelona ready for immediate deployment to Morocco.
In the middle of July 1909, troops were being shipped out to Morocco on a daily basis, with the soldiers marched through the city down a corridor of wailing ‘widows’ straight to the docks. A further call-up of 40,000 conscripts was Madrid’s response to the colonialist ‘Scramble for Africa’ that was spiralling out of control. Rif bandits threatened Spanish harbour facilities in Melilla and Tangier, and more importantly the mines of Beni-bu-Ifrur, which were run by a consortium that included Count Romanones, Güell and the Marquès de Comillas. On 24 July, El Poble Català – on the eve of the anniversary of the infamous 1835 riots, which during the Carlist civil war had desecrated the monastery of Poblet, Gaudí’s childhood obsession – announced prophetically that: ‘The valves have been closed and steam is accumulating. Who knows if it will explode.’
Following reports of early defeats in Morocco and atrocious conditions there, wild rumours circulated.
On Monday 26 July, Barcelona woke up to a general strike. The muddled response from the authorities, with Barcelona’s Governor Ossorio refusing to impose martial law, fanned the smouldering flames. Captain General Santiago quickly stepped in. It was too late. Within hours, civil disobedience was transformed into violent outbursts of anti-clerical rioting. On Monday night the Marists’ Workers’ Circle of Sant Josep was burnt down. The working-class neighbourhoods of Barcelona were transformed overnight into battle zones, with makeshift barricades designed to prevent cavalry charges thrown up across the narrow streets in scenes reminiscent of the revolutions of 1848 and the French Revolution. From the heights of the Park Güell, Gaudí could see smoke plumes rising over the city below.
On Tuesday, in the Barranco del Lobo in the Gurugú Mountains overlooking the coastal plain of Melilla, General Pintos was ambushed by the Rif and lost close to 200 conscripts.
Barcelona rapidly descended into total anarchy as Church property became a target for an orgy of revenge. By the end of the week, when the authorities once again took control, more than forty religious establishments and twelve churches had been recorded as burnt out, while graves were desecrated and nuns’ corpses paraded down the street in a diabolical version of the city of Berga’s La Patum festival. Despite the violent scenes, only three priests were killed.
Gaudí’s response ran the full gamut of horror and disgust to residual sympathy for the average working man. He had once famously admonished Father Brasó for his lack of leadership at the moment the pueblo needed help. This was precisely the reason why the Sagrada Família was being built. And it is perhaps a testament to Gaudí that despite a strike committee meeting held at the Sagrada Família at the height of the rioting, it was left untouched. The memory, however, of the Semana Trágica remained an integral part of the psyche of Barcelona’s divided world.
For Gaudí, however, the Semana Trágica had an immediate impact. It was in response to the revolutionary carnage that Pere Milà refused Gaudí’s demand to cap La Pedrera with a four-metre-tall Madonna placed up on high as if guarding the streets. Gaudí walked away even more convinced that only the Sagrada Família might end the madness and eventually save the day.
On 15 November, Bishop Laguarda officially inaugurated the Sagrada Família school. The next three years for Gaudí, however, would prove the most difficult of his life. The emotional fallout of the Semana Trágica and Milà’s refusal to bend to his wishes gradually took its toll. In May 1910 an attack of brucellosis, mood swings and bouts of high fever forced Gaudí to leave Barcelona for recuperation in Vic. The following summer, after a relapse, Gaudí was accompanied by Dr Santaló up into the Pyrenees to Puigcerdà where, increasingly debilitated, he requested a lawyer to witness his will. Then, in January 1912, Rosita, who had been cared for by the nuns, finally passed away.
Brought up on the philosophy of suffering as a necessary prerequisite for future salvation, Gaudí soldiered on. In Vic he had plenty of opportunity to discuss with his friend Bishop Torras i Bages the purifying powers of pain. Having recently delivered his pastoral La Glòria del Martiri, Torras i Bages understood Gaudí only too well. Beauty and harmony, they both agreed, always came at a cost. It was death, after all, that gave meaning to life. Over the next few years his spiritual soulmates Francesc Berenguer, Bishop Campins, Bishop Torras i Bages and Eusebi Güell died, leaving Gaudí feeling increasingly isolated. Focused exclusively on the Sagrada Família, and with no one to share his lonely evenings, Gaudí’s appearance notably changed as he increasingly resembled a hermit, slightly dishevelled, his legs bandaged against the cold, the vanity of youth forever gone.
In many senses these were also his most glorious years, the suffering proving strangely cathartic as he carefully refined his ideas. Rarely consulted, the Sagrada Família archives hold a full set of the Albums published by the Asociación Espiritual de Devotos de San José, which constitute an invaluable document for the study of the master’s work.
In the final chapter I discuss the continuation of the Sagrada Família after Gaudí’s death. It is interesting that those architects who followed in his path have often been criticised for not following his original designs. It is obvious that the critics have never studied the Albums.
The first Album, published in 1915, is full of fascinating detail. For the first mass celebrated back in 1885 the conch shells ready to hold the Holy Water were catalogued as a gift of the Philippines as a tribute to the imperial ambitions of the Catalan church. Across the Nativity façade shell motifs could be found everywhere. Even the towers – which reminded many Catalans of the castellers, the human towers built during the festas – were almost certainly inspired by the ubiquitous molluscs, the shells of Aquarius, washed up on every beach. By 1915 the Album was already celebrating the façade’s decorative range. It promised to offer the viewer the ‘animals and flowers of Christmas and the Nile’. The giant cypress tree, which symbolised death and resurrection, was celebrated for its ‘incorruptibility’ in whose ‘trunk is veiled . . . the Sacred Heart of Jesus’. Gaudí, who must have read the Album, was praised for creating a building that was ‘a mystic poem worked in stone’, which reflected ‘the alma of the whole of Spain’.
By 1915, Gaudí had already set the height limit for the building at 160 metres, just short of nearby Montjuïc, a courtesy gesture acknowledging God the Creator’s precedence. As of 30 December 1914, the junta had spent ‘the huge sum of 3,200,000 pesetas’ on the building works. The Album proclaimed, ‘Our century’s egotism had been defeated by Charity and Faith and by devotion to the Holy Family,’ while stressing once again Bocabella’s core value that ‘Providence wants to be built with alms only’.
The 1917 Album went into more detail, focusing on the Sagrada Família’s historical importance. With comparative drawings its scale was compared to St Peter’s in Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore and St Mark’s in Venice, the last of which it completely dwarfed. In the back pages of the Album the Sagrada Família’s footprint was transposed over the Spanish cathedrals of Avila, Segovia, Huesca and Pamplona. It actually approximated in its layout most closely to the pure tour de France-inspired Gothic of Burgos and León. The closest in size, however, was the gigantic Seville cathedral, whose founding fathers, the cathedral chapter, had declared back in 1401: ‘Let us build a church so beautiful and so grand that those who see it finished will think we are mad.’ There was no more fitting tribute to the Sagrada Família than this august comparison.
Put head to head with Salamanca and Toledo, the Sagrada Família still held its own, while next to the imperial scale of Granada there was little to set it apart.
Importantly, the Sagrada Família was considerably larger than Barcelona’s own cathedral. Compared to the religious architecture of other countries, it stood up well against Chartres, Rheims, Paris and Cologne. What the Album revealed is it what every architectural historian already knows: great architects are immensely competitive.
One detail that even today awaits a diplomatic solution was the inclusion of Gaudí’s detailed drawing of two chapels on the far side of the Carrer Mallorca, which were linked to the main body of the temple by a gigantic flying staircase spanning the street. Designated the Baptistery and Forge, these two chapels speak of Gaudí’s belief in the purifying powers of fire and water. Today, where the two chapels would be placed stands a block of flats that will need to be razed to the ground if Gaudí’s dream is to be finally realised.
By 1922, with the publication of the third Album, the money spent on the project had crept up to 3.5 million pesetas. Despite the fact that Gaudí was celebrating his seventieth birthday, he was still described as ‘remarkable and young’; he was certainly remarkable but no longer young. In the September of 1924 he was still feisty enough, however, to stand his ground against the police after celebrating a mass commemorating the Catalan martyrs of 1714. Refusing to speak to them in anything but Catalan, he was marched off to the cells. ‘The whole thing affected me like a miniature Hell: skinny guards with the sort of appearance that people call that of a “poor devil”, the chiefs, better paid, with massive bellies, are the Lucifers who give the orders.’
By the early 1920s, with the rise of the new Noucentisme style, Gaudí’s architecture was beginning to fall out of favour. It is reasonable to assume that donors were beginning to feel charity fatigue, while the junta might be excused a certain lack of patience as the Sagrada Família seemed to progress as slowly as ever. Gaudí was even recorded as walking the streets begging for alms. Whether true or not, it portrays his dogged persistence and his ongoing belief that patience might triumph at the end of the day.
With Gaudí’s father Francesc living to the ripe old age of ninety-three, it was reasonable to assume that Gaudí himself might still have many years ahead of him. Regardless of his own expectations, Gaudí had prepared an exhaustive archive of floor plans, drawings, elevations and detailed models to give direction to any future collaborators inheriting the job. Part of the reason for focusing almost exclusively on the Nativity façade had been to set a benchmark of quality and detail for his successors to follow.
Gaudí over the years had become increasingly interested in music, not surprising for someone fascinated by the transcendent harmony of the spheres. He had always found Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the total work of art – intriguing. The cypress tree would be illuminated by the presence of brilliant white birds. Running up the towers, giant letters sang out their Hosannas. The towers themselves were designed so that the window apertures might murmur with the winds and the specially designed tubular bells would call the faithful to prayer. In January 1925 the first of the four towers, dedicated to Saint Barnabas, was finally completed. ‘Fa goig!’ – Give joy! – Gaudí frequently exclaimed, hoping that his work might give pleasure while also instructing the curious mind.
‘Fa goig’ were also the last words he spoke to his workmen as he set off on 7 June 1926 for confession at Saint Felipe Neri. Minutes later he was run over by a tram. Amongst all the confusion Mossèn Gil Parés and his assistant Sugranyes finally located him in the early hours of the morning, broken and semi-conscious in the public ward of the Hospital de la Santa Creu. Three days later, at 5 p.m. on 10 June 1926, Antoni Gaudí finally died. Joan Matamala was charged with making the death mask, a moving tribute to a genius in repose.
Two days later on 12 June, Gaudí was given the nearest thing to a state funeral that Catalonia had ever seen. Having received papal dispensation, Gaudí was laid to rest in the chapel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in the crypt of the Sagrada Família, whose construction he had directed forty-two years earlier. It was a poignant closing of a circle, an alpha and omega moment, both a beginning and an end.