The Sagrada Família Takes Its Final Shape
- The Sagrada Família is an immense, unfinished church in Barcelona. Its construction began
- in 1882 on what was once outlying farmland and is now the city’s center. When I last visited the
- building, in July, it was nine inches away from being the tallest in the city. Less than two weeks
- later, when a ring beam to support the base of a cross was added to its biggest tower, dedicated
- to Jesus, the church surpassed the city’s two highest skyscrapers, both of which stand at five
- hundred and five feet tall. The sandstone basilica will reach its full height once the
- fifty-five-foot-tall cross is installed atop the tower, later this month. It will be the tallest church
- in the world.
- But Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan architect who spent forty-three years working on the Sagrada
- Família, did not think that his work should compete with God’s, so the basilica will remain a few
- feet lower than the iconic peak of Montjuïc. Gaudí’s structure is a head-spinning mixture of
- morphing geometrical forms, many inspired by nature. Its conical Art Nouveau pinnacles have
- the lumpy beauty of sandcastles. Building such an unusual church has been a famously slow
- project, even in a country where, to American eyes, many things move without haste. Gaudí was
- confident that his vision would one day be fulfilled. “Providence will provide”, he assured a
- student.
- The Sagrada Família was founded as an expiatory church, meaning that it would be financed
- by prayerful donations from people atoning for their sins. Pretty quickly, this pay-to-pray
- arrangement gave way to a less ecclesiastical approach. In 1915, the Sagrada Família started
- charging a visitor’s fee—currently twenty-six euros. It is now the largest tourist attraction on the
- Iberian Peninsula. Last year, nearly five million visitors came to see the basilica’s dizzyingly
- decorated interior; another nineteen million milled around outside, probably because they could
- not get tickets, and gazed at its equally ornate façade, with its Byzantine-looking tiling, windows
- shaped like honeycomb cells, and clumps of multicolored ceramic grapes.
- Gaudí’s original plan called for a church with eighteen towers. In addition __ the Jesus
- tower, another would be dedicated to Mary, with bluish granite ornaments meant __ evoke her
- iconic cloak; there would also be spires for each __ the four Evangelists and the twelve apostles.
- By 1977, just eight of the apostles’ towers had been built, along with parts of the main structure,
- but the church still had no roof or columns. For a time, construction seemed to slow down further.
- In 1984, National Geographic noted that there were “few workers remaining on a job that could
- take another century”. Recently, under Jordi Faulí, the site’s ninth and current chief architect,
- who was appointed __ 2012, things have moved much faster. Today, the church has fourteen
- towers, including the four dedicated to the Evangelists and the nearly finished structure
- celebrating Jesus.
- In the nineties, the Sagrada Família team began using software originally created for
- aerospace design to model Gaudí’s complex shapes. They then routed the plans to machines at
- various quarries, which used diamond-tipped blades to cut rocks with precision. This innovation
- preceded Faulí’s stewardship—it was the brainchild of an architect from New Zealand who
- became an enthusiast of the project in the seventies—but nearly everything that the staff does
- now involves digital tools. The designs for the towers’ mosaic tiles, which Gaudí constructed by
- hand from ceramic shards, are workshopped and finalized using 3-D design software called
- Rhinoceros. This method leaves behind a clear twenty-first-century trace, but it has allowed the
- team to build sections at ten times the previous pace. The project has become a model of
- techno-ecclesiasticism. Gaudí famously declared, “My client is not in a hurry”, but Faulí and those
- around him seem to be.
(Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/22/is-the-sagrada-familia-a-masterpiece-or-kitsch – text specially adapted for this test).