"My client is not in a hurry."

Said architect Antonio Gaudí about his life's work.  National Geographic this month has a pretty good article about an interesting (and I think, beautiful) building, well over a hundred years in the making:  Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona.

In 1883 Gaudí inherited the Sagrada Família from another architect, who had laid a traditional neo-Gothic base. Gaudí envisioned a soaring visual narrative of Christ's life, but knew that the massive project could not be completed in his lifetime. For more than 12 years prior to his death in 1926—he spent his last year living at the site—he rendered his plans as geometric three-dimensional models rather than as conventional drawings. Though many were destroyed by vandals during the Spanish Civil War, those models have been vital to Gaudí's successors.

"They contain the entire building's structural DNA," explains Mark Burry, an Australia-based architect who has worked on the Sagrada Família for 31 years, using drawings and computer technology to help translate Gaudí's designs for today's craftsmen. "You can extract the architectural whole even from fragments. The models are how Gaudí met the architect's challenge: taking a complex, holistic idea and explicating it so others can understand and continue it after your death."

I can see why the style is polarizing, why many people don't like it.  (Gaudí's style superficially resembles flamboyant Gothic, in my opinion, while taking inspiration from natural forms.) But unlike the pared-down modernism that's so common in recent church building, the style (though new) strikes me as recognizably, richly, traditionally Catholic.  And I love the story of how it's being built so slowly, the job passed on from generation to generation, much like the cathedrals of old.

Comments

[Beth]

Ah, Erin, a topic close to my own heart. I've plundered Gaudi's Barcelona and taken inspiration at every curve and proportion. He is a true master of proportion and to be inside one of his designs is to exist in a space that is intuitively familiar and settling. As Eco would say, architecture, among all the arts, is the one that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythm, the order of the universe. And Gaudi tapped into that rhythm so perfectly.

I never know where you will take me, I love stopping by, thanks.