In 1951, the UN passed a resolution to resume full diplomatic relations with Spain. Despite Franco’s closeness to the defeated Axis powers, the UN’s volte-face was the first step towards the normalisation of Spain’s relationship with the international community. At the height of the Cold War and midway through the Korean War, the United States realised that Franco’s implacable anti-communism and his position as a bulwark against the Soviets was of huge geopolitical importance.
On 27 May 1952, the thirty-fifth International Eucharistic Congress opened in Barcelona with Franco’s full support. After a long hiatus, the International Eucharistic Congress was the first to be convened since before the Second World War. By chance, the history of the congress, whose purpose was to celebrate the centrality of the Eucharist to the Catholic faith, had run in perfect tandem with the building of the Sagrada Família, predating the laying of the first stone back in the nineteenth century by just one year. In the intervening years the congress had grown into a huge event with delegates flying in from all over the world. More than 300 archbishops with a further 300,000 pilgrims were expected to transform the event into a massive religious jamboree. Politics, however, was never far from the pulpit.
In front of a crowd of 100,000 the Cardinal Primate of Spain, Cardinal Enrique Plá Deniel, delivered a blistering attack on communism.
In a well-orchestrated display of support, all factories and shops were closed down to encourage Barcelona’s million-strong workforce to join the 15,000 prelates who were expected to officiate at a whole host of public masses. As the papal legate Cardinal Tedeschini arrived at the bottom of the Ramblas below the statue of Columbus, the city’s 400 churches rang their bells in celebration. El Caudillo, Francisco Franco, was expected to arrive by ship to attend the PR coup, while behind the scenes he was busy negotiating a concordat between Spain and the Vatican, which would be signed the following year.
With ‘Peace’ as the congress’s central theme, Pope Pius XII joined the delegates by radio broadcast from the Vatican, where he led the congregation in a prayer for union and concord so ‘that the lily of peace may blossom forth on our barren and desolate earth’.
In preparation for the congress, the Sagrada Família had been provided with some cosmetic improvements including a large sweeping ceremonial staircase in front of the Nativity façade and a battery of floodlights to bring its dramatic silhouette alive at night in order to rival the new bronze statue by Miret which crowns the Tibidabo.
On 30 May, at the Sagrada Família, more than twenty bishops assisted by 150 priests administered the sacrament to 20,000 women who had queued patiently in line in front of Gaudí’s Nativity façade. Not since Gaudí’s funeral had so many devotees attended such a special event.
Of huge symbolic importance was the presence at the congress of New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman, who represented yet another step towards the normalisation of Spain’s relationship with the US and signalled that its international pariah status was a thing of the past. Spellman, nicknamed the American Pope, his chancery the Powerhouse, was the consummate fixer, having some years before been assigned the task by Pius XI of smuggling his encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno, which criticised Mussolini, through Italy and on to Paris and the international press. He was also a rabid anti-communist who lent his full support to McCarthy’s witchhunts of subversive ‘reds’ in 1953. His views on public morals and the pernicious effects of Hollywood would have sat easily in the pages of the Devotion’s Hoja Informativa.
Hard on the heels of the successful International Eucharistic Congress, Spain’s thawing relationship with the United States received a more official imprimatur with the signing in September of the Pact of Madrid, which promised necessary financial aid.
Everyday life in Franco’s Spain in the early 1950s was one of terrible hardship. The official economic policy of autarky – self-sufficiency – suffocated growth. The system of estraperlo (corruption, named after a famous case during the Second Republic) and a flourishing black market led to immense disparities in wealth distribution. Massive internal migration was the result of subsistence farming becoming completely unsustainable. The knock-on effect in cities like Barcelona was immediate. The huge influx of immigrants from the south, given the catch-all epithet Murcianos, created shanty towns with quaint names like La Font de la Mamella and Can Valero on the slopes of Montjuïc, tempted there by the promise of milk and honey. The reality was less romantic. At Can Valero almost 30,000 people shared seven public taps. In Can Valero, at least, vulnerable families were given enormous help by the Carmelite father José Miguel, who helped fund a school and a dispensary.
On any spare land makeshift towns sprang up. From the Barceloneta heading north along the beach for five miles to where the Besós river debouched into the Mediterranean, tens of thousands lived in shacks in the legendary Somorrostro.
Not far from the Sagrada Família, on the wrong side of the railway tracks that ran alongside the Ronda de Sant Martí, the notorious shanty town of La Perona grew up, named after Eva Perón, who visited it in 1947, whose inhabitants naïvely believed that her personal largesse would help them start a new life. The 1950s was a period of dramatic change and widespread poverty. It is not surprising that the Sagrada Família, whose future was entirely reliant on donations, would also experience a restricted budget. The brutal conflict of the Spanish Civil War, however, was unlikely to be repeated despite the grinding poverty for a raft of different reasons: firstly, the Franco regime ruled through a toxic mixture of fear and zero tolerance; secondly, many of the newcomers came from Andalucía and Castile, lands that were conservative in tradition and where there was still a deep-rooted respect for the Church; thirdly, a whole generation of Republicans had fled into exile; and last of all, those that remained suffered from profound demoralisation and sheer exhaustion.
A year after Cardinal Spellman’s visit, a very different American visited Barcelona to witness another reality, a world away from the large PR extravaganza that had surrounded the congress. In autumn 1953, Tennessee Williams passed through Barcelona, en route to Morocco, and was shocked by the gaping divide between the rich and poor. While in Barcelona, he had been chewing over his Pulitzer-winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The Big Daddy character, played by the great Burl Ives in the subsequent movie, reminisces to his son Brick over those days back in Barcelona: ‘The hills around Barcelona in the country of Spain and the children running over the bare hills in their bare skins beggin’ like starvin’ dogs with howls and screeches, and how fat the priests are on the streets of Barcelona, so many of them and so fat and so pleasant.’
There is a profound irony in the fact that when denounced as a communist and pulled up in front of McCarthy’s inquisition, the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, Ives decided to save his skin by informing on some of his friends. Cardinal Spellman would surely have approved.
A couple of months after the International Eucharistic Congress drew to a close the Sagrada Família received even more attention. It is quite possible that the congress had been instrumental in reigniting a broader interest in Gaudí’s work.
On 31 July 1952 Nikolaus Pevsner, the high priest of architectural history in the English-speaking world, in a series of broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, finally allowed himself to be seduced by Gaudí’s flights of fancy. His admission that the English had unfairly swept Gaudí aside and kept him firmly out of the official canon was perhaps a recognition of his earlier scepticism, and he went on air to make amends. His description of the Sagrada Família was wonderfully evocative:
The façade culminates in four (narrowly spaced) tall conical or sugar-loaf towers in pairs of two and two close together. They rise and taper, first consisting of tall columns, then of taller piers with spirally set horizontals (or) transomes if you like between and finally ending in forms of no architectural precedent whatever, spires of crustaceous form, details sometimes like the jazzy light fittings of 1925, sometimes like celestial cacti, sometimes like malignant growths, sometimes like the spikes of bristly dinosaurs. And the whole of these spires above the conical, brown stone towers is made of glazed faience with an incredible technique . . . this description may sound to you crazy. Well, of course it is that. It may sound to you also not religious – but there you are wrong, because you are English and Protestant, whatever you call it. But it may sound to you vulgar too, and that it also isn’t. It has, at least in my opinion, all the ferocious power of conviction which baroque architecture can possess. It is fabulous, it is miraculous, it hits you hard, it gives you no peace, it does not let go of you, and for that very reason it is proper for the church, rousing you to prostrate yourself and to worship. So at least it must have seemed to the Catalans; for the building goes up out of the donations of the people, and the people, I can assure you, adore it.
Finally, after almost two decades, Pevsner was making up for his sin of omission. In Pevsner’s seminal 1936 Pioneers of Modern Design, Antoni Gaudí, the most radical and groundbreaking of all architects, had been left out altogether.
It is ironic that while it had taken Pevsner until the 1950s to finally fall for what he described as Gaudí’s ‘phantasmagoria’ and to kickstart a wider appreciation, in Barcelona itself there were the beginnings of an organised lobby that wanted to put an end to work on the Sagrada Família. Pevsner, however, had also been alert to the difficulties that might lie ahead:
One more word. Gaudí died in 1926 and since then the Barcelonese have pondered over the problem of what to do with the Sagrada Família. I told you, no more is up so far than about one eighth. What can be done? It is obvious to me that one can’t, not even with all the dedicated lunacy of Spain, continue à la Gaudí. He was, you will now agree, the most personal, inimitable of architects. He kept only the fewest of designs or models. Every detail was decided face to face with the block and the surface. So there seem to me only two possible answers, one more tempting, the other (probably) more constructive. You can leave this cliff of a church as a ruin, plant the rest of the site sensitively and enjoy the building in future as the hugest of all custodias – that is the Spanish name for (those) tower-shaped monstrances you see in the cathedrals. Or you can trust in the Spanish genius and make a competition inviting designs not in the style of Gaudí nor in the so-called International Modern Style. Perhaps amongst the talented young architects of Spain one would come forward as fervent as Gaudí, and as original as he.
What Pevsner, in the language of the 1950s, understood as ‘the dedicated lunacy of Spain’ made no allowance for the totally determined members of the Devotion and its junta, who planned to continue the works as planned. Without a deeper knowledge of how the Gaudí inheritance had been passed down through an unbroken line of faithful assistants, Pevsner could not possibly have understood the real sense of continuity that existed. Nor could Pevsner, without privileged access to the painstaking work of Quintana or that of his colleagues and future successors Lluís Bonet i Garí and Isidre Puig Boada, have seen how faithful they were to Gaudí’s original plans. Isidre Puig Boada’s monograph El temple de la Sagrada Família, published in Catalan in 1929, was the most authentic way to access reliable information but it is doubtful that Pevsner knew this work.
At last Gaudí was winning official favour in the academic world. In 1956, the Cátedra Gaudí was formed at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona to promote, understand and protect his legacy and archive. In 1958 the American academic George R. Collins visited Barcelona to study Gaudí’s work in depth, which would lead in 1960 to the publication of his monograph Antonio Gaudí, the first serious study in English. From his base as professor of history of art at Columbia University, New York, Collins played a central role in the rehabilitation of Gaudí’s international reputation. Collins’ chosen path to securing Gaudí’s contemporary relevance to the Unites States cleverly utilised the debt that great public buildings like Boston Public Library, Massachussett’s State House and New York’s Grand Central terminus, among many others, owed to the Catalan vaulting technique.
In the same year, 1960, Conrads and Sperlich’s The Architecture of Fantasy, including works by Gaudí, was published, as too was Josep Lluís Sert and James Johnson Sweeney’s monograph Gaudí. The studies took very different approaches to Gaudí’s work. Conrads and Sperlich focused on the phantasmagoria, while Sert, famous as dean of design at Harvard and a celebrated pioneer of the Catalan International Style, chose to look at Gaudí as an empirical seeker of simple construction solutions. Importantly, these diverse contributions indicated a growing consensus that Gaudí was a master worth taking seriously.
In 1964, a Gaudí exhibition at Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts prepared the ground for his debut in 1966 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
While Gaudí had now become the subject of serious architectural study, his growing reputation also coincided in the late 1950s and early ’60s with the beginnings of the tourist boom that would kickstart the ‘Spanish Miracle’. Gaudí was a perfect figure for the counterculture’s hippy ethos. On the surface he was an exact fit for all the clichés of Spain as the breeding ground of surrealist genius. It was a simplified image that totally disregarded his deep Catalan cultural identity and his fervent religiosity.
In 1954 work started in earnest on the deep foundations for the Passion façade. The realisation that work on the Sagrada Família had finally moved on from the research laboratory stage to concrete action focused the junta. In 1955 the first full-scale public fundraising drive proved surprisingly successful.
The first free-standing column in the interior of the Sagrada Família, with its signature corkscrew twist, was put in place in 1957. More hours, as we will see later, were expended on computing and understanding Gaudí’s careful calculations for the columns than on almost any other aspect of the Sagrada Família build.
In 1958 the artist Jaume Busquets completed the final sculptural ensemble for the Nativity façade’s central Charity portal. A highly skilled all-rounder, Busquets had been a part of the traditional Amics de l’Art Litúrgic, a Catholic collective. Despite his influential position as the first director of the prestigious Massana art school, Busquets could also do Christian humility to perfection. Over the years Busquets had advised on the stained-glass decoration for the Sagrada Família crypt. Jaume Busquets’ holy family sculpture, while showing off his consummate gifts as a craftsman, is also genuinely moving. The Virgin Mary, bent over the nude Christ child, lowers the baby into a basin bath with a tenderness familiar to any mother. Looming high overhead, the scene draws the viewer in with its engaging simplicity.
In 1961, with ever-increasing numbers of visitors, it became obvious to the junta and the three architects that a small museum detailing the building’s history, its aims and future aspirations might help to educate the public. The first of many variations, the small museum proved to be a significant draw. If the museological process had helped to refine the architects’ ideas, it also gave rise to some vocal opposition.
On Saturday 9 January 1965, in an open letter to the editor of the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia, an impressive collection of architects and intellectuals co-signed their opposition to continuing work on the Sagrada Família. Many, like the architects Òscar Tusquets, Ricardo Bofill and Oriol Bohigas, belonged to the talented young generation of liberal intellectuals branded the Gauche Divine, a cosmopolitan group which also included the homosexual poet Jaime Gil de Biedma. As stylish members of the Catalan burgesia they were constitutionally and ideologically opposed to the brutishness and vulgarity of the Franco regime, and for many of the brilliant Gauche Divine the continuation of work on the Sagrada Família represented at best an anachronism, at worst a ludicrous ahistorical travesty.
Other co-signatories, however, also included artistic heavyweights such as Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies and two of the greatest living architects of the twentieth century, Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier. Bruno Zevi, the Italian architect, theorist and founder of the Association for Organic Architecture, apart from his highly vocal stance against classicism, found the concept of other architects bastardising Gaudí’s temple pure anathema. Many of the signatories had their own agendas, but it was clear that amongst some of the more progressive circle of Catholics, the idea of spending money on a huge white elephant instead of pastoral care was deeply unpalatable. The concept of an expiatory temple, they believed, was both outdated and irrelevant. What they all put their signatures to was a letter which stressed that Gaudí’s creative process often relied on changes that were effected during the actual build. What the letter also highlighted was that Gaudí’s work had a very pictorial, narrative aspect to it and was in itself a work of art. No one would ever think of finishing off a painting or a sculpture, the letter argued, without the artist involved. Why then finish a building? Antoni de Moragas, the dean of COAC, the College of Architects in Barcelona, and other professionals expressed the view that the Sagrada Família served none of the city’s urban needs and that the works should be frozen until its future was vigorously debated.
Reading between the lines, of course, what many of the signatories really objected to was the creeping evolution of what they regarded as nothing better than a religious theme park.
Òscar Tusquets would later repent signing the La Vanguardia open letter, but the most unlikely signatory was the sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs, who would subsequently recant and then devote the last two decades of his life to sculpting the Passion façade.
The debate created by the open letter had little real effect on the Sagrada Família, as its status of private Devoción effectively protected it from outside interference. In fact, in the following few years donations increased rather than dried up. Of more significance was the death in June 1966 of Francesc Quintana, which left Puig Boada and Bonet i Garí as co-directors.
In November 1976 the façade, quite literally the skeleton, of the Passion façade was topped out with its four bell towers echoing those across the transept at the Nativity. The Sagrada Família was beginning to create the illusion of a rising mass, like a dramatic wedding cake.
Strangely, despite the progress and the growing international attention that came in the wake of tourism, the reputation of Gaudí in Catalonia’s official architectural circles was at an all-time low. It was almost as if foreign approval questioned the validity of what he had done. Architectural students in Barcelona who studied during that period remember that Gaudí had become a figure of ridicule whenever mentioned, if mentioned at all.
In the 1980s, with abstract art already a common language well into its third generation, and with pop art already being replaced by the cold, detached, cerebral art of conceptualism, the religious, almost nineteenth-century realism of the Sagrada Família looked dated. Between 1981 and 1982, the sculptor Joaquim Ros i Bofarull, a disciple of Pablo Gargallo, completed the two separate groups of the Adoration of the Magi and the Adoration of the Shepherds which flanked the Charity portal of the Nativity façade. The figures are strangely static and wooden. The subject should suggest surprise and wonder, as the two groups representing the rulers and the pueblo join together to witness the revelation. The effect, created by Ros i Bofarull, is more like a hackneyed theatre backdrop.
In 1983 with Puig Boada and Bonet i Garí now both in their nineties, they finally retired from their duties in favour of the architect Francesc Cardoner i Blanch, who would turn out to fulfil his role merely as a caretaker-director before Bonet i Garí’s son, Jordi Bonet i Armengol, took over in 1985. From 1979 the architectural team was supplemented by the arrival of the New Zealander Mark Burry, an architectural graduate from Cambridge University who was intrigued by Puig Boada and Bonet i Garí’s ability to carry on despite the apparent absence of plans. Though Burry was just finishing his BA thesis, they took the unusual step, very much in the spirit of Gaudí, of inviting the complete novice to join their team. What Burry quickly learnt from his elder peers was that Gaudí’s plans obeyed complex rules of geometry that, once applied to the existing material, could be patiently recreated. What the geometry gave you, most importantly, was the building’s DNA.
At first, with all the enthusiasm of the young apprentice, Burry laboriously drew up by hand a new set of working blueprints. When Bonet i Armengol took over, Burry was just at the point of making the quantum leap over to the CAD programs that had helped the manufacture of the complex shapes needed in the aeronautical industry for the Concorde jet. Having combined his MA studies with his position as architect-researcher, Burry in 1989 moved across to the world of computer-assisted design. It would prove a revolutionary moment in the history of architecture. What was curious, and again so typically Gaudínian, was the interface and tension on site between the latest technology and a sculptural tradition that had hardly changed since the birth of time. The clumsy toolkit of hammer and chisel was now in competition with an ever-evolving explosion of technological advances that today sees 3D printing as the total norm. Jordi Bonet was wise enough to see the value of both.
Without a doubt the most polemical aspect of the Sagrada Família project was the acceptance in 1986 by the sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs of the commission for the Passion façade. Subirachs was the first to admit that his work would be in no way an imitation of Gaudí’s: in fact, he demanded it as a condition for signing the contract. Where Gaudí used organic forms and the curves of grace that he associated with God, Subirachs is hard, cold, angular and uncomfortable. The bare bones and structure of the Passion façade had been carefully thought through by Gaudí, sketched out in elaborate detail on the drawing board. Since the 1950s work on the façade had been brought to conclusion by the trio of architects Quintana, Isidre Puig Boada and Lluís Bonet i Garí.
Gaudí had once explained to his future biographer Joan Bergós that ‘in contrast with the Nativity façade’, which was deliberately ‘decorated, ornamented and turgid’, the Death façade, as he chose to call it, was to be ‘hard, flayed, as if made of bones’. He was quite clear on the effect it should have on the viewer. He wanted it to ‘instil a sense of fear in people’. ‘To do this,’ he explained, ‘I shall not skimp on the chiaroscuro, projecting elements and voids, everything that results from the most gloomy effect. What’s more, I am prepared to sacrifice the building work itself, to break arches, cut columns, all for the purpose of giving an idea of how bloody sacrifice is.’ It is particularly poignant that when Gaudí was designing the Passion façade he was recuperating from a serious, potentially fatal, attack of brucellosis and depression up in the Pyrenees, in Puigcerdà. Down in Barcelona, his only living family member, Rosita, was drinking herself to death.
What is obvious is that Gaudí was working on the boundary line between sculpture, architecture and autobiography, looking at the nihilism of the subject as dictating directly to the creator the evolution of the pathetic ensemble. Adopting this criteria, Subirachs’ interpretation of Gaudí’s wishes is perhaps better than it looks. To be fair to Subirachs he had accepted the commission only on condition that he would not attempt to imitate Gaudí. Instead he wanted something ‘simple and cinematic’. Heavily influenced by Henry Moore, Subirachs would suffer from the same weakness as the Englishman of pandering to institutional taste. And like Moore there was a marked tendency towards endless repetition masked by the illusion of modernity as an instantly recognisable studio style. His lantern eyes, hollow cheeks or an angular nose are just some of the signature details subsumed under his palatable pre-packaged flirtation with abstraction. The all-over sparrow-pecked or rough plaster finish is an artful disguise for a lack of modelling. Less often mentioned is Subirachs’ debt to the far more talented Antoni Tàpies and Eduardo Chillida, and his weak reworkings of sculptural ideas brilliantly essayed by Jorge Oteiza. If judged against his peers, Subirachs is certainly in a different league. However, to judge him like that is to do him a disservice. The comparisons, however, do explain why Subirachs became a whipping boy and an easy target for art critics who judged him against the grit and authenticity of genuinely avant-garde pioneers. For the art critic Robert Hughes an encounter with Subirachs’ work was thoroughly dispiriting, but not for the reasons that the sculptor had hoped. ‘One cannot contemplate the progress of this work without a sinking heart,’ Hughes bemoaned. With his hackles raised and at his most acerbic, Hughes carried on to dismiss the new sculpture at the Sagrada Família as no better than ‘rampant kitsch’. For Hughes, Subirachs was a mere dealer in second-hand aesthetics.
What some critics have discerned in Subirachs’ sculptures, with their hollowed-out cheekbones and their lifeblood seemingly drained away, is spiritual atrophy accompanied by a marked tendency to manufacture a seductive cocktail out of the twin doctrines of miserabilism and populism. The resulting works all too easily slip over into the realm of the mawkish.
Right from the very beginning, Subirachs’ work on the Sagrada Família – although uniquely his – had to follow a strict narrative that demanded both popular appeal and a generous reach. Legibility and appropriate atmosphere are of key importance. Gaudí had wished for an effect that was ‘hard, flayed, as if made of bones’, and with this in mind, Subirachs certainly delivered.
Gaudí’s design for the Passion façade begins with a series of inclined pillars that look like anorexic versions of those in the Park Güell. The canopy high overhead is like a gigantic baldachin or dust-catcher on a medieval retablo mayor. Daniel Giralt-Miracle in his Essential Gaudí likens the columns to the trunks of the sequoia, one of the oldest living organisms on earth, some actually predating the drama that unravels on the façade below. From the Last Supper, through other scenes that include Judas’s Kiss, the Ecce Homo, Longinus on Horseback and the Crucifixion, Subirachs takes us on a serpentine meandering walk up to Golgotha. At ground level, wrapped around the central column and within our touch, stands a larger-than-life depiction of a tortured humiliated Christ midway through suffering his flagellation at the hands of the Roman soldiers. Subirachs’ façade demands that we drop our aesthetic armour, momentarily, and allow ourselves to follow the story in all its detail.
One of the details that immediately draws our attention is the ‘magic square’ wherein all the rows of numbers compute to a total that always arrives at the symbolic number thirty-three – the age of Christ. Open to a myriad of interpretations wandering through a minefield of cod maths, Masonic ritual, alchemy and the occult, Subirachs’ magic square is a diversion that is certain to encourage as many conspiracy theories as those surrounding President Kennedy’s death. Like the famous labyrinth in Chartres or Dürer’s depiction of a magic square in his wonderfully enigmatic engraving Melencolia I, where the magic constant is thirty-four, we will never exhaust the need to construct elaborate conceits. It is human nature to search for reason in a world of chaos. If nothing else, by leading us to Dürer’s Melencolia I, Subirachs makes a fascinating allusion to the image of Gaudí at work.
Dürer’s brooding angel, with knitted brow, seated amongst the compasses, polyhedron and perfect sphere, is a perfect stand-in for Gaudí, alluding directly to the Pythagorean belief in the centrality of numbers and form in the cosmos – a large part of the subject matter of the Nativity façade across the other side of the transept. Here he is – like a twentieth-century Leonardo da Vinci – troubled, questioning and, like Dürer, intent on proving the symbiotic relationship of art, mathematics and science while employing all his ingenuity and knowledge in pursuit of architecture’s Holy Grail. It is a perfect metaphor for Gaudí’s introspective soul, which never stopped questioning his faith or the need to transform personal suffering into a truly moving art. The Passion façade, for obvious reasons, is Gaudí and Subirachs’ darkest hour.
In the same year that Subirachs accepted the commission for the Passion façade, in 1986, work began on laying the foundations for the nave and aisles. Up until the millennium, work would continue on the body of the temple as the walls and vaulting of the nave and apse started to give a real sense of the whole. With the passing of 2000, work on the Sagrada Família dramatically changed gear. Mark Burry and Jordi Bonet could now take full advantage of all the advances in computer analysis, laser cutting and robotisation. While the technology was Burry’s specialist area it never diminished his respect for Gaudí’s immense creativity. Far from it. Burry felt increasingly humbled that what the computer was feeding back to them confirmed the accuracy of Gaudí’s calculations, which somehow miraculously he had computed almost entirely in his head. For the scientist, architect or amateur aficionado, this was one of the most exciting phases in the Sagrada Família works. Visitors were allowed on site as the cranes and builders worked on unhindered. What they got was an insider’s view.
In 2001 the Sagrada Família school building was restored and repositioned on the corner of the site, and was transformed into a display case for a deeper understanding of the Gaudínian style. A whole new vocabulary had to be learnt. For the layman who could grasp the efficiency and beautiful simplicity of the catenary arch the complexities now unravelled. Conoids, for instance, are the shapes created out of straight lines running parallel to a directrix plane fanned out to meet a single axis. Or, to be less precise, a certain type of curved surface whose shape has the beauty of a perfect wave. Words, however, are more easily replaced with graphic models or with a geometrical equation. When conoids are multiplied they can form a parabolic conoid, which makes its first dramatic appearance on the roof of the Sagrada Família school with its wonderful undulating waves of tile. It is both economical and fantastically elegant. Perhaps Stefan Hildebrandt and Anthony Tromba can help us here with the simple analogy they use in their fascinating book The Parsimonious Universe: Shape and Form in the Natural World. For understanding Gaudí’s language of form we should return to our innocent childhood games. Take a bowl of soapy water and play around with a pair of wire rings. Pull up the surface with one. Or stretch a transparent glistening film between the two. Within minutes you will be making shapes with names as complex as hyperbolic paraboloids or the hyperbolic hyperboloids that look like elegant funnels which Gaudí would use to puncture the Sagrada Família’s roof to illuminate the nave below. In the towers, one of which was completed in Gaudí’s lifetime, the stairs sweep up in a simple elegant helicoid like a twisting snail’s shell, as in the Great Mosque in Samarra. In some of his works he had gone for the more complex double helix – employed by da Vinci at Chambord – and later identified by Crick and Watson in 1957 as the shape of DNA. Had Gaudí been alive he might have responded, ‘But, of course!’
The transformation of these geometric formulae to a computer was not just a time-saving exercise; it also opened up infinite possibilities. Burry’s contribution has radically changed the parameters of architecture.
The story of the Sagrada Família is also the history of changing technologies. When Gaudí embarked on his career in architecture, his was the first generation to use photography as a vehicle for taking a virtual journey around the glorious universe of different styles. As armchair architects the world’s variety lay at his generation’s feet. More than 130 years later, materials, techniques, technologies and communications have radically changed. Mark Burry is based in Melbourne, where he holds the post of professor of innovation and director of the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at RMIT University. As founder director of the RMIT Design Research Institute his responsibilities are daunting. However, by commuting to Barcelona on a frequent basis and through computer link-up he can be ‘virtually’ permanently on site. Considering his experience and field of expertise it comes as no surprise that Burry has worked as a consultant for Arup, Foster and Gehry on various occasions. Transforming fantasy forms into plastic reality offers limitless scope for our built environment, as architects like Zaha Hadid have demonstrated so well.
Work continued on the Sagrada Família, and dissenters gradually melted away as they were confronted with the inevitable. Work was not about to stop with so much invested in the project. Gaudí studies had built momentum with specialists from the Netherlands such as Jan Molema and Jos Tomlow, the German experts Arnold Walz and Rainer Graefe and Leonid Demyanov from Moscow, amongst many others, joining Spanish and Catalan experts to dissect and debate his talents and revolutionary techniques.
In 2002, with the celebration of the Año Internacional Gaudí, 150 years after his birth, Gaudí studies turned the corner and became mainstream. Daniel Giralt-Miracle’s enthusiasm and subtle diplomacy managed for the first time to unite almost every cultural institution in Catalonia and Spain to celebrate Gaudí’s genius wherever he had worked. For Gaudí enthusiasts, 2002 proved a watershed. For the Sagrada Família it proved a godsend. The Gaudí boom, as we know it today, would provide the basilica with an income stream from tourism that secured the ambitious plans to finish it on time to celebrate the centenary of Gaudí’s death in 2026.
It was, at last, possible for the visitor to visualise Gaudí’s final plans as a reality rather than as a distant dream. Details sparkled in the light. Although high above, the viewer could see clearly blown-up renditions of autochthonous fruit as visually ripe metaphors for the human soul: orange persimmons, heaped chestnuts, juicy figs, almonds, blood-red cherries, blushing peaches, black prunes and golden medlars spilling over in plenty like the fruit stalls at the famous Boqueria market or Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, where fruit are the embodiment of fleeting earthbound and sensual pleasures. But Gaudí’s message is radically opposed to that of Bosch. Indeed, it is far more likely that Gaudí was thinking of the tree of life, as described in the Apocalypse, which produced a different fruit for every month of the year to cure all ills.
The Japanese sculptor Etsuro Sotoo, who left Japan for the honour of working on Gaudí’s masterpiece, carefully carved these starbursts of colour over several years. For Sotoo the symbolism was as simple as it was profound. In a lecture at Fordham University, New York he elaborated on his ideas: ‘At the top of everything there’s fresh, ripe, colourful fruit with no leaves because when our body gives up, our soul rises. When a person has heard a lot of good words and has read a lot of good books, his soul is ripe fruit, but up there there are no words; you don’t need any words.’
Inside the basilica the columns branch to form trees which lead the eye up to a canopy of vaults that Gaudí hoped would make us think of a natural shelter of leaves where light could break through. On the exterior, alluding back to the internal structure and upward growth, the piles of fruits illustrate nature’s bounty.
What Gaudí had taught Sotoo was that the spirituality of art might offer access to a deeper faith. And so it proved for Sotoo. Over more than three decades, until the present day, Sotoo has carved his way towards helping shape the Sagrada Família’s identity. On the Nativity façade Sotoo added a choir of fifteen angels who, like sacred muses armed with their panoply of popular instruments, from harps to bagpipes and the exotic sitar, celebrate and bear witness to the birth of the Saviour. As happened so often before with Gaudí’s other works, when he was still alive assistants like Jujol had been trusted to make their own mark in the spirit of the overall design. And Sotoo has continued in a similar vein, mining the same rich seam with singular carvings in durable stone.
Once again viewers step back to take another look. As eyes are pulled up towards the pinnacles, the silhouette begins to fill out and take shape. Like an elaborate wedding cake, towers rise so that, according to Gaudí, ‘the exterior will be harmonious with the interior with a view to ensuring that a pyramid form prevails’. Eighteen towers in total will crowd together and push up in unison like a family in stone. Crowning the Passion, Nativity and the as-yet-unfinished Glory façade, will be twelve towers measuring between 98 and 120 metres and acting as giant finials bordering the central spatial drama. On each corner of the crossing will be four towers dedicated to the Evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, crowned with their attributes, the angel, lion, ox and eagle. These are planned to rise to 135 metres, in perfect symmetry. Over the apse, only slightly lower and crowned by a star, will rise a tower dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The final central tower, rising to a vertiginous 172.5 metres, is dedicated to Our Saviour, Jesus Christ. The crowning detail Gaudí planned is a giant four-armed cross from which, at night, like a moral compass, brilliant searchlights will illuminate the way and remind us always of Christ’s mantra, ‘I am the light of the world.’
Inside and out, sculptural ensembles, dedications to saints and sees alongside carved motifs and narratives in stained glass form a rich lexicon of liturgical cross-references that would take a lifetime to unpick. The architect in us marvels at the incredible ambition; our inner sculptor at the host of details that fill and overload the façade with a kind of fascinating medieval horror vacui; our historian struggles to make sense of the contradictions that blend future, present and the distant past; while the devout Catholic broods over the powerful message and mission that the building avows.
For mathematicians the Sagrada Família offers an opportunity for endless contemplation and not a little scratching of heads. One of Gaudí’s favourite buildings while still a student was the romantic Alhambra, a Nasrid palace complex that, according to Robert Irwin, may well have been inspired by Basra’s esoteric tenth-century society the Brethren of Purity. The Brethren believed that ‘the science of numbers is the root of other sciences, the fount of wisdom, the starting point of all knowledge, and the origin of all concepts’. For them, seven was the perfect number, and the human soul travelled through seven heavens on its transit towards God. Part of the Alhambra’s enchantment lay in its use of the square root to create a hard-to-discern intimate harmony between all its parts. Close, but not exactly the same, was the relation of the head to the human body, which approximates the Golden Section. For Gaudí, of more importance was the biblical resonance of seven in terms of the creation and particularly its proliferation in the Book of Revelation.
Gaudí had often employed a module as the defining measurement for an entire structure; sometimes, as in the Casa Vicens, this might come from something as banal and practical as the width of a tile, or, as in Mataró, the length and width of a humble plank of wood. At the Sagrada Família the module was exactly 7.5 metres, the width of an aisle. Almost all the other measurements are multiples of that defining module: the nave its double at 15 metres; the nave plus the four aisles 45 metres; the height of the aisles 30 metres; the height of the nave 45 metres; 60 metres across the entire transept, with 60 metres as the defining height of the vault over the crossing. With its symbolic human scale – approximating to the Golden Section – which Gaudí described as the ‘tree-man’, he was convinced it would imbue the space with a sense of harmony. A module, however, can be multiplied an infinite amount of times. The initial measurement, human in scale, can explode into a gigantic, almost terrifying space. For the generation of architects following Gaudí’s death the discovery of how this module functioned facilitated their interpretation of this entire design. There may have been ‘providence’ at work, as Gaudí had claimed, but he also left almost nothing to chance.
The disciplines of geometry, mathematics and engineering are certainly legitimate ways to understand the structure of the Sagrada Família. However, for Gaudí the essence of the building was how the form followed its liturgical function. The Sagrada Família, like the Bible, was there to be read again and again to reveal the secrets of its divine message. Gaudí’s basilica, built on the foundations of an expiatory rationale, revealed a Catholic dogmatism that was also linked to a peculiar mysticism and an almost pantheistic reverence for nature. It is almost certain that Gaudí also thought of the building on a millennial scale, as the great temple to lead Catholicism into the future and function as a lighthouse for a new age.
In his tightly argued thesis La Sagrada Família según Gaudí Dr Armand Puig i Tàrrech, ex-deacon of Catalonia’s faculty of theology, has proposed various routes through the building in order to make sense of Gaudí’s spiritual labyrinth. Considering the troubled history of the Sagrada Família and the deep trauma of 1936, it is not surprising that Dr Puig should invest the bricks and mortar with millennial anxieties and fears. For him, to see only the spatial drama of the building is to ignore the message encrypted on and within its walls.
According to Puig, the Sagrada Família is nothing less than Gaudí’s attempt to build a New Jerusalem, whose overriding message is the pursuit of universal peace. Surrounded at ground level by its cloisters, which hug the perimeter wall, the Sagrada Família rises like a single city unit or an exotic dreamscape, reminiscent of those medieval miniatures that illustrate the rare Beatus manuscripts so particular to Spain. To cross the threshold is to enter a sacred space.
The Sagrada Família functions both as Christian allegory and as a temple for prayer. The innocent first-time viewer might not understand that the building is so highly charged. Even curved shapes like the paraboloid generated from three straight lines were seen as powerful metaphors for the trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. All around the visitor is surrounded by signs and symbols that build up, bouncing meaning off each other, sticking like molluscs to a ship at sea. Slowly at first, according to Puig, the Christian mysteries gradually unfold.
The first route proposed by Puig is the Via Humanitatis, running from the central Glory façade forward to the altar and surrounding apse. Starting from the other side of the Carrer Mallorca, the visitor will cross a bridge, still to be built, towards visions of the creation sculpted on the exterior wall. Below, in the tunnel, amongst the petrol fumes of passing traffic, lies hell. Crossing the Via Humanitatis at the transept is what Puig calls the Via Christi, which starts quite logically outside the Nativity façade, depicting the birth of Christ, and leads across in front of the altar, a great stone sarcophagus, onward to Subirachs’s Passion façade. The final route, the Via Ecclesiae, is in essence a conflation of the two previous routes but focusing on ritual spaces like the Baptistry. It is circular – an alpha and omega journey. At each point Puig illuminates details with biblical fragments of text or key phrases from the Nicene Creed, drawing us back to the orthodoxy that sits at the heart of this most unorthodox space.
Everywhere there are fascinating details. If there is one text key to explaining the Sagrada Família, it is the prophetic and disturbingly enigmatic visions of Saint John on Patmos. High above the altar a single circle of light, surrounded by twenty-four openings, alludes to the musicians in the Apocalypse who surround Christ in Majesty seated in his mandorla as depicted in so many Romanesque altars, Puig suggests. On the exterior walls, serpents, lizards and other reptiles face downwards as if scurrying under a rock, off en route to the underworld, symbolising, according to Puig, Christ’s victory over evil.
By 2005 the interior of the Sagrada Família, with its stained-glass windows fitted high in the Nativity façade, began to assume an air of finality. The following year work started on the choir stalls that flank the nave. By 2009 the vaulting over the nave and apse was completed. At last the junta would no longer have to worry about the weather for the masses and celebrations set against the backdrop of the Passion façade. The public’s attention now moved indoors to study the staggering new space. Despite the grandeur of Subirachs’ four great bronze doors, covered in a minutiae of script and cryptic clues, his Passion façade still drew its fair share of criticism. Having been so polemical in the past, it certainly benefited from the change in focus as it was reabsorbed back into the whole.
On Sunday 7 November 2010 Pope Benedict XVI consecrated the Sagrada Família in a service made especially poignant as he anointed a massive block of rose-coloured stone with perfumed chrism oil, a blend of olive oil and balsam. Particularly moving was the papal blessing received by Jordi Bonet, the senior architect in an unbroken line that goes back to Gaudí himself. It was without a doubt the most important day in the Sagrada Família’s history since the foundation stone had been laid back in 1882. Pope Benedict’s address was appropriately prophetic:
The joy which I feel at presiding at this ceremony became all the greater when I learned that this shrine, since its beginnings, has had a special relationship with Saint Joseph. I have been moved above all by Gaudí’s confidence when, in the face of many difficulties, filled with trust in divine Providence, he would exclaim, ‘Saint Joseph will finish this church.’ So it is significant that it is also being dedicated by a pope whose baptismal name is Joseph.
The meat of Pope Benedict’s homily was as traditional as expected. Like Gaudí, however, he also stressed the evangelical power of beauty, arguing forcefully that it was ‘one of mankind’s greatest needs’.
In Barcelona there were a few dissenting voices who protested against the pope’s views on abortion and homosexuality, but they could not spoil the party. Pope Benedict was there to give voice and authority to Gaudí’s firmly held belief that he was not creating Europe’s last Gothic cathedral but rather the first of the new Christian era. This apparent contradiction gave a fascinating insight into the tension that sat at the heart of Gaudí’s work. Both Gaudí and Pope Benedict’s modernity seem sometimes as old as the hills. The Sagrada Família, with its roots firmly in the past while building for the future, is a strange anachronism. When finally finished, how will it sit in the expanding cityscape?
Cities are always in flux, both threatened and enlivened by the condition of change as an enduring reality. During planning for the papal visit the Sagrada Família had been served notice that the city’s need for an AVE high-speed rail link, burrowing deep underground dangerously close to the basilica’s foundations, took precedence over supposed safety issues.
Back in 2007 the group SOS Sagrada Família had released an alarming film in which they simulated the collapse of the temple. In 2009 ADIF, the company in charge of the high-speed train link running north to join the French network, commissioned an independent report from Intemac, which reported that more vibrations were coming from the Sagrada Família’s own building site than the tunnelling could possibly produce. Using all the legal options open to them, the Junta Constructora had their petition to stop the works rejected three times by the Audiencia Nacional, which on no less than six occasions requested detailed reports on the potential seismic vibrations produced by the tunnelling. Just months after the pope’s visit, in November 2010 the Spanish Congress debated again the dangers to the safety of the Sagrada Família, which back in July 2005 had been declared a World Heritage Site of ‘outstanding universal value’. The right-wing PP party, in opposition, declared their support for the junta. With elections looming, the issue had become highly politicised. The PSOE Socialist Minister of Public Works and Transport, José Blanco, argued it was all about finance. To reroute the AVE would increase costs and delay by up to four years the necessary rail link with France.
ADIF, throughout the works, had kept the public informed of their exacting safety measures, which included more than 8,000 vibration sensors and the placing of more than a hundred reinforced concrete pillars, with another 146 sensors placed on the Sagrada Família site. By July 2011, just months before the elections, tunnelling had passed through the danger zone. The junta’s obstruction to the AVE, however, had the potential to backfire, with voices claiming that perhaps the development of the Sagrada Família might do well to stop where it was.
The ambitions for the Sagrada Família are, as we have seen, enormous. They always have been. Spiritually it was hoped that as an expiatory temple it could offer moral, social and religious direction and pardon society’s multitudinous sins. As a building it was going to represent the New Jerusalem. It would become the Cathedral of Europe just as the whole utopian edifice of Europe was coming unstuck.
In 2012 back at the Sagrada Família there was another changing of the guard as the remarkable 87-year-old Jordi Bonet finally retired in favour of Jordi Faulí i Oller, who like so many architects before had started working on the Sagrada Família before qualifying, back in 1990. Faulí’s speciality, like his colleague Mark Burry, was the use of CAD programming to analyse the build.
Despite the recent setback in failing to stop the AVE line, work went on. Etsuro Sotoo, the Japanese sculptor, continued to add detail. The fifteen angels that had been placed on the Nativity façade were still recognisably within the Gaudí style pioneered by the Matamalas at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was when Sotoo learnt not to try to imitate Gaudí but instead sculpt in the spirit of Gaudí that we saw his real character. The fruit on the pinnacles planned by Gaudí were now more idiosyncratic and recognisably the work of Sotoo.
In the summer of 2014 Sotoo put in place the first of four giant bronze doors, each one measuring 7 metres by 3, at the entrance to Gaudí’s Nativity façade. For Sotoo, whose passion for the Sagrada Família sprang out of his love for stone, this represented a new departure. It is with these doors that Sotoo comes into his own. Predominantly green, the doors are covered in bronze ivy, pumpkin and lily flowers and a host of insects. They are joyous; as exotic as Klimt or a Japanese print; as exuberant as a pool of Monet’s water lilies. They are delightfully whimsical, playing to the inquisitive child who spies a bug or butterfly. Sotoo has hit the right register, where popularity and accessibility meet at the door of craft.
The future of the Sagrada Família is no longer in question. It is not a matter of if but when. The final decoration, if judged by progress on the Nativity façade, which took more than a century to complete, is still an age away. In Catalonia the Catholic Church has often been brave and highly innovative in commissioning art. The twelfth-century Christ in Majesty from Sant Climent de Taüll still stands as one of the greatest images in the history of art. Closer to us is the decision of the junta to offer the Sagrada Família to a novice architect who had never worked on that scale. Closer still is the decision by the chapter of the cathedral in Palma de Mallorca to offer the Santísimo Chapel, to the right of the high altar, dedicated to Saint Peter, to the avant-garde artist Miquel Barceló, who created a riotously decorative ceramic wall depicting the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Right at the other end of the spectrum, in 2015 the director of the museum at the shrine of Montserrat persuaded the internationally famous abstract artist Sean Scully to decorate the chapel at the Benedictine monastery of Santa Cecilia de Montserrat.
Scully’s triumphant austerity brings us back to where we began. In L’Art Sacré Father Couturier had stressed the intimate relationship between art and faith: ‘It was an unbroken tradition: century after century it was to the foremost masters of Western art, diverse and revolutionary as they might be, that popes and bishops and abbots entrusted the greatest monuments of Christendom, at times in defiance of all opposition.’
What I hope I have offered you with this Sagrada Família is not just a building but a community of ideas whose rich past has shaped an exciting future. High on the walls Gaudí inscribed the alpha and omega logos. In the beginning is its end and in its end a new beginning.