The Sagrada Família was begun by a bookseller. Josep Maria Bocabella raised the money in small donations, the first stone went down in 1882, and the first architect resigned within a year. The work passed in 1883 to Antoni Gaudí, then thirty-one, who kept almost nothing of the earlier plan. He 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. He worked here for forty-three years, and after 1914 took no other commission.
Inside, the church works like a forest. The columns divide into branches near the ceiling, the vaults open into whorls of skylights, and the glass is tuned by compass point — blues and greens where the sun rises, reds and ambers on the west — so the nave changes colour as the day crosses it. Gaudí was struck by a tram in 1926 and died three days later, with only a fraction of the church standing. It was consecrated as a basilica in 2010 and is still unfinished: the cranes turn, and under the vaults there is a permanent murmur of people looking up.