Sagrada Família

Landmark · EixampleBarcelona,Spain

Gaudí's unfinished Barcelona church, begun in 1882, its columns branching like trees under vaults of skylights and glass tuned to colour the nave by hour.

The Sagrada Família is a church built like a forest. Antoni Gaudí's columns rise and divide into branches near the ceiling, and the vaults open into whorls of skylights. The glass is tuned by compass point — blues and greens on the east, reds and ambers on the west — so the nave changes colour as the day crosses it. Gaudí called the Gothic flying buttress a crutch and leaned his columns inward like trunks instead, so the load runs straight down them into the ground. The first stone went down in 1882 and the work has not stopped. Gaudí took the job in 1883, aged thirty-one, threw out almost all of the earlier plan and then gave the rest of his life to it — forty-three years, the last of them living on the site. A tram struck him in 1926 and he died three days later, with a fraction of the church standing. It is still not finished, and that is the thing to listen for while you are inside: cranes turning overhead, and under them a permanent low murmur of people looking up.

Worth knowing

HistoryA bookseller's church, paid for in small change

Josep Maria Bocabella raised the money in small donations and hired a different architect first, who resigned within a year. The church was consecrated as a basilica in 2010.

Good to know

The pavement by the doors is the crush — step back into either square facing the church; from the pond in Plaça de Gaudí the towers line up and double in the water.
The two fronts are meant to disagree — Gaudí's Nativity side is dense and alive; the Passion side, carved much later by Subirachs, is gaunt and angular. Opinion on it stays divided.
Zoom, don't widen — the wide interior shot turns to white clutter, while the mosaic fruit crowning the towers only reads through a long lens. Outside, morning lights the Nativity front, late sun the Passion.
Don't walk past the small brick building — it is Gaudí's schoolhouse for the workers' children, its thin wavy roof built entirely from straight lines. Le Corbusier stopped to sketch it in the 1920s.

Things to do

1
Follow one column all the way up
Pick a single column in the nave and start at the floor. Feel the star-shaped base under your hand, then watch the section change as it rises: the star gains sides at every turn until, near the top, it reads as a circle. Note the stone too — the darkest, hardest shafts stand at the crossing, where the load is greatest.
2
Sit still for the colour change
Take a seat near the western wall in late afternoon and wait. Reds and oranges slide down the columns and spread across the floor as the sun drops. Then walk to the eastern end, where the same hour leaves the blues and greens cool and unlit.
3
Read the Nativity façade from outside
Stand outside the eastern doors and work upward slowly. Find the tortoise and the sea turtle carrying the two door columns, the chameleons at the outer corners, and the cypress hung with white doves at the summit. Name three plants you can recognise before you go inside.