A goal for me in finally visiting Barcelona was, of course, to see the work of Gaudi. The crowning glory of Gaudi’s oeuvre is the great Temple of La Sagrada Familia in the Eixample district north of the old City of Barcelona. I paid two visits to the site, easily reached by Metro from the hotel in the old center. The first visit was late morning on New Year’s Eve day and the crowds were thick and the line to get in far around thSo e corner. Tour buses jostled Tetris-like to disgorge hordes of tourists. This kept me at bay and I retreated to the park on the south flank of the great pile to sketch the facade. An enquiry at the information booth informed me that the building would be open on New Year’s Day and, of course, we should arrive early.
So at 8:30 a.m. Dave and I, showed up to a respectably diminished line but on a day so clear, but so blustery, that no one was allowed up into the towers. We paid and hastened inside the church.
The Temple of La Sagrada Familia is very much a construction site. Today, as it is a holiday, there is no work going on, but the piles of material, the ubiquitous scaffolding, the general absence of surface decoration and the use of placeholder elements like plain glass for stained, bear testament to the transitory sense of what we are seeing today. Almost 140 years into construction, this is not unlike the grand works of cathedral building of seven centuries before. Even the same issues have plagued the completion of this grand monument. The question of funding, the availability of craftsmen, the technical hurdles, the death of the original designer, have all been detriment to the progress. Two world wars and an especially debilitating Civil War also contributed. They are aiming to finish the Temple in 20 years. We shall see.
The basic parti is straightforward enough, a Latin Cross with nave, transepts, apse and side aisles. But the moment the plan is expressed upwards, it is like a florid burst of hyper-realized organic elements, seemingly duty-bound in adherence to natural laws of physics and mathematics while seemingly victimizing architectonic forms to bizarre whims of the architect’s fancy and, more cryptically, a foreboding sense of a Catalonian force-majeure.
Gaudi plays with us. He employs obvious pure Gothic motifs, such as fenestration patterns, but then contorts fundamental Gothic tectonics by directing the roof and upperstory forces to be borne on buttressing disengaged from the exterior walls (as to be expected), but then massively redirecting these forces back to the central aisle columns in the angled planes of a chunky choir loft some 50 meters up. Thus he frees the lower story of solid wall to bathe within with light and does so sans the eyesore of flying buttressing without.
He unapologetically works the columns throughout as literal trees, replete with upward width dimunition, stylized knotholes, tessellated compound branching and forces-balancing angular thrusts. Everything soars, everything rises: the eye is sent aloft.
The roof/ ceiling is an overhead miasma of ellipsoidal ocular forms intended to magnify the strong Mediterranean light from above; to combine with the light form the walls and galleries. It is all about light in the end. The only material that can even approximate the nature of God.
The entirety of what is built and what will be still sits with me. It seems I was able to briefly share in a singular vision of Gaudi’s belief in God, the essence of his spirituality and mysticism given form. This was the penance of the last decades of his life, his expiations in service to his beliefs. What I saw impressed me as an architect on those pragmatic qualities that frame the crux of my craft. But it also soared the essence of my spiritual being.
I will return in twenty years to hopefully see the church in its final flowering.
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