The world-famous Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família in Barcelona, Spain, known more commonly simply as Sagrada Familia, began as an idea in the 19th century by a prosperous and religious bookseller, José Bocabella, who wanted to build a contemplative sanctuary away from the hustle and bustle of the industrial center. Today marks the 100-year anniversary of its second architect, Antonio Gaudí’s, death, and it is still a work in progress, but its soul is on full display.
Founder Bocabella was deeply religious and strongly devoted to St. Joseph and the idea of Christian family values. He envisioned a church dedicated to La Sagrada Familia, or The Holy Family, and purchased a plot of land outside the city in an area called El Poblet (meaning “the small village” in Catalan) for about $12,000. At that time, it was a dusty cow field.
He hired Francisco Villar as his architect, who designed a predictable Neo-Gothic-style church common in the late nineteenth century. They began construction on March 19, St. Joseph’s Day, in 1882. After one year, Bocabella and Villar clashed intensely over building costs, and the architect resigned in a huff!
Bocabella next hired Antonio Gaudí, a young polymath and devout Catholic architect, 31 years old, with only five years of experience, to replace Villar. While in architecture school, the director said of Gaudí, “We have given this academic title either to a fool or a genius. Only time will show…”
By 1883, Gaudí had only completed one job of note in Barcelona: two lamp posts in a public square.
In the same year, two residential commissions went under construction: a summer home for a rich ceramic tile merchant, Casa Vicens, and a more whimsical villa, a more telling snapshot of his creative inclination for Sagrada Familia, El Capricho (“The Whim”).
The first order of business for Gaudí, upon taking over the Sagrada Familia project, was to throw out Villar’s old blueprints and free the church from the rigid symmetry, Romanesque arches, and static Gothic windows. Instead, he looked to nature for inspiration. But where?
Villar’s plain exterior design of the church, with a single spire, was replaced by an organic mound of 18 spires, using both brick and stone. The forms are at once visually unlike any usual forms known in Europe at the time. At first glance, it appears to be inspired from the mud brick constructions of North African Islamic buildings like the Sankoré Mosque in Timbuktu, Mali.
Yet, in my opinion, one must dig deeper into nature to find the true birthplace of the forms, like stalagmites, the towering forms found on cave floors, or the spires and interior chambers (seen in his later apartment building) found in termite mounds in Africa. Only there, in the earth, can we find the raw, amorphic, and simple line forms captured in the basilica’s towers.
At the time of Gaudí’s death in 1926, only one main tower was finished with three others visible, covered in scaffolding. Just 10–15% of the church was complete upon his death.
The specific designs for the stained-glass windows, ornamentation, and interior art were left largely to the interpretation of his successors. There is no evidence that Gaudí read the American Transcendentalists, but he shared the understanding that God was expressed in nature, and he certainly was born at the height of the Art Nouveau movement, which rejected rigid and traditional classical styles.
Ten years later, in 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out, and while Gaudí had models and drawings for the entirety of his vision for the church, anarchists from the FAI set fire to the crypt and broke into Gaudí’s workshop, setting fire to the building and partially destroying Gaudí’s original plans.
This marked the era of Fascist control of Spain under General Franco until the dictator’s death in 1975. During his early administration, the country suffered economically, and personal liberties and free speech were heavily suppressed. The church remained in a state of deep hibernation, with little change.
In June of 1985, I visited the Sagrada Familia. It was still covered in scaffolding and very incomplete, yet I remember feeling, as a young man of 26, the emotional and visual impact of the unique structure, unlike anything I had seen in my life. I thought, surely Gaudí’s vision was well before his time, but sadly I was unable to visit the interior nave; instead, I attended a very crowded Mass in the basement. I was unable to experience the vision he had for the interior.
Today, as I write on the 100th anniversary of his death, I’m filled with awe, and respect for the depth of his creative animus, and tremendous appreciation for the many Spanish artisans who have dedicated so much of themselves to work to complete Gaudí’s vision.
In Gaudí’s lifetime, when confronted about the progress of construction, it is said that he replied, “My client is not in a hurry!”
Only now, 144 years after the project began, can I see the vision come into full focus as it enters the stretch to completion. The exterior of the church is an imposing figure, majestic, but rooted in the earth with most materials that both come from and will return to the soil. A form that is grand enough to evoke a sense of awe in the onlooker, suitable to honor a God whom Gaudí deeply loved and communicated with, but a structure that does not communicate conformity to an artificial hierarchy, but instead to the God that lives both in nature and within all living beings.
Once inside, there is a sense that we are visually set free as we look upward to the wonder of a flower-shaped constellation canopy, sending a kaleidoscope of heavenly starlight dancing above the thick and imposing forest of tree-like forms supporting the heavens above the nave.
Toward the end of his life, Gaudí became very reclusive. He attended Mass daily, frequently prayed, and often maintained strict fasting. He never married or took lovers openly. He began to care less and less about his appearance, and unlike his younger self, who had the appearance of a dandy, his world turned within. In 1926, he was struck by a tram and lay lifeless in the street. Given his appearance, emergency care was slow to come until someone recognized him and he was brought to a hospital, unfortunately too late and he died.
In 2003, the Catholic Church opened his cause for canonization. Pope Francis officially declared Gaudí “Venerable,” recognizing that he lived Christian virtues to a heroic degree.
In 2005, Sagrada Família was added to the existing (1984) UNESCO World Heritage Site, “Works of Antoni Gaudí.”
The veneration and acknowledgments are worthy, but they should not overshadow what Gaudí most fervently tried to achieve: bringing and expressing the light of God, both within himself and for those who visit his basilica.
Gaudí’s efforts, genius, and humility were strictly aligned with Bocabella’s vision when he began the project: to honor the Holy Family and, ultimately, to give anyone who enters Sagrada Familia a sense of awe inspired by the natural world—the true body of a universal God—with whom all of us interact daily.