WHEN ANTONI GAUDÍ became the chief architect for Barcelona’s Sagrada Família Basilica in fall 1883, he had no illusions that he would live to see its completion. “There is no reason to regret that I cannot finish the church,” he said. “I will grow old, but others will come after me. What must always be conserved is the spirit of the work, but its life has to depend on the generations it is handed down to.”
After 142 years of construction, Gaudí’s masterpiece is slated to be finally completed in 2026, 100 years after Gaudí’s death. The finished basilica will have three distinct facades, only one of which was completed in Gaudí’s lifetime, and 18 towers — 12 for the apostles, four for the evangelists, one for the Virgin Mary, and the tallest and most central tower for Jesus. When you look at the Barcelona skyline from Park Güell, where the architect lived for almost 20 years, the basilica soars above the rest of the city, clothed in scaffolding. From far away, the cone-shaped, sand-colored spires look like intricate, naturally occurring stalagmites, reaching toward the heavens.
Gaudí’s iconic style — lots of curves, a heavy use of mosaic, and motifs from nature and Catalonia — was an extension of the broader artistic movement of Modernisme, the Catalonian cousin of Art Nouveau. Even though some of the visual language of the Sagrada Família had precedent in buildings such as the Castell dels Tres Dragons or the Palau de la Música Catalana, both by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, the basilica was still controversial. George Orwell once said that the Sagrada Família was “one of the most hideous buildings in the world,” and lamented that it hadn’t been destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. But more than a century later, Gaudí is widely recognized as an artistic genius, and his works have UNESCO World Heritage site status.
There are no exact right angles in the Sagrada Família’s design because Gaudí believed right angles didn’t occur in nature. Instead, you will find the spiral of a shell, the honeycomb structure of a beehive, the branches of a tree, and the unique curvature of a leaf. He also pioneered the mosaic technique known as trencadís, where pieces of ceramic or glass were broken into irregular shapes and applied to the surface of a form.
The Sagrada Família is a perfect synthesis of the most important parts of Gaudí’s identity: It is a testimony to his deep Catholic faith (in April, Pope Francis declared him “venerable” a first step to sainthood), an homage to Catalonia’s culture and nature, and an architectural master class. This synthesis is perfectly demonstrated by the fact that once completed, it will be the tallest church in the world — but not taller than the nearby hill of Montjuïc. Gaudí believed humans should not surpass God’s creation.
I finally got to see the Sagrada Família for myself on a chilly afternoon in February. I noticed how the pillars, with their root-like bases and branch-like capitals, effectively evoked the feeling of being in a forest. The light pouring in from the colorful stained glass perfectly captured the feeling of dappled light streaming through leaves. I was also struck by the sounds of construction happening around the building while hundreds of people were milling around inside it, snapping photos or taking a quiet moment to pray. We were standing in the middle of an unfinished project, but that did not make it any less breathtaking.
Gaudí dedicated 43 years to the Sagrada Família but only saw about 20% of the building completed in his lifetime. On June 7, 1926, Gaudí was hit by a tram while walking to evening prayer. He was dressed in shaggy clothing and had no identification on him, so passersby ignored him, thinking he was a beggar. By the time he was finally admitted to the hospital and identified, it was too late to save him. He died three days later and was buried in the crypt of the Sagrada Família, where today daily Masses are held in Catalan, Spanish, and English.
After Gaudí’s death, construction on the basilica continued, although it was stopped during the Spanish Civil War, when it was vandalized and plans were destroyed, and paused again in 2020 due to covid-19. But plenty of people believe that construction on the basilica shouldn’t have gone beyond what Gaudí designed, including Narcís Serra, the mayor of Barcelona from 1979 to 1982. “We are running the risk of doing a pastiche of the Gaudí concept,” Serra said. “To try to finish this temple nowadays is no longer about following his exact plans. From the point of view of respecting his work, it would have been much better to stop at the point when we were no longer sure that this was exactly what he wanted.”
But it’s hard to imagine that Gaudí would have wanted the Sagrada Família to be left incomplete. He did not see the basilica as “his work” but rather as an extension of God’s creation. He never saw his genius as anything other than divinely mandated. “The creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create ... he discovers,” Gaudí said. “Anything created by human beings is already in the great book of nature.” Gaudí trusted both God and future generations in a way that allowed him to reject urgency. Once, when asked when construction would be completed, he famously said, “My client,” referring to God, “is in no hurry.”
The Sagrada Família helped me remember that, just like the basilica, the work of helping to build the reign of God might never be fully complete — but that doesn’t mean we should stop building it. A work in progress can still be a thing of majesty.
THESE DAYS, it feels hard to believe that the arc of the moral universe is bending toward justice, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it. But standing in the Sagrada Família with my head tilted back, staring up at the tree canopy made of stone, dappled with multicolored light, I thought of all the people who relentlessly fought for peace, justice, and beauty in their lifetimes and never saw the results. The only way to sustain ourselves while doing work that will outlive us is to have faith that a higher power is keeping the lights on.
Gaudí believed in “the spirit of the work” — surely that same spirit is within all of us, waiting to be tapped, waiting to fuel our own work, whatever that may be.
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