99% Invisible - 281- La Sagrada Familia

Episode Date: October 25, 2017

There are a lot of Gothic churches in Spain, but this one is different. It doesn’t look like a Gothic cathedral. It looks organic, like it was built out of bones or sand. But there’s another thing that sets it apart from your average old Gothic cathedral: it isn’t actually old. Gaudí wasn’t able to build very much of his famous church before he died in 1926. Most of it has been built in the last 40 years, and it still isn’t finished. Which means that architects have had to figure out, and still are figuring out, how Gaudí wanted the church to be built La Sagrada Familia

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The line to enter Barcelona's most famous cathedral often stretches around the block. L'Azagrata Familia, designed by Antony Gaudi, draws so many people to see it that the neighborhood is congested with tour buses and taxis and scooters. in scooters. Some three million people went inside the church in 2016, and another seven million came just to stare at the outside of this strange behemoth structure. If you travel around Spain, you'll see a lot of old Gothic churches. Producer Katie Mingle was in Spain earlier this year.

But this one is different. First, it doesn't look like a Gothic cathedral. It looks like it was built out of bones or sand or like it just twirled out of the sea, like a fractal. It looks organic somehow. But there's another thing that sets it apart from your average old Gothic cathedral. It isn't actually old. Gaudi wasn't able to build very much of it before he died in 1926. Most of the church has been built in the last 40 years, and it still isn't finished.

Which means that architects have had to figure out and still are figuring out how Gaudi wanted the church to be built? We are all together in a room, a special room. The most important part of the building we are building. That's Hironimo Bouchario, one of the current architects of the building. And he says the clues to understanding how to move forward on the construction of La Sacrata Familia are kept in the room we're standing in right now in the basement of the church.

So since this is radio, can you describe what's in this room? Ah, okay. How do you call these? Shelfs. There are a lot of shelves with fragments, little pieces of plaster, beak, small. Before he died, Galdie left elaborate plaster models, detailing his plans for finishing the church. But about 80 years ago, they were all basically destroyed.

Now they're in pieces. It doesn't look like just from this and those little pieces that that would be enough to like figure out the whole thing. Yeah, I understand that it's difficult to know what we have to do if the main architect is not here. Oh, he's not with us. What we try to do is to understand how he thought,

and it's not easy. I know. It definitely hasn't been easy for the new architects to recreate and understand the vision of Antony Gaudi, and there are people who think they shouldn't even have tried, that the building should have stopped after Gaudi's death. But it didn't. The building is currently the longest running construction project in the world, and the architects are still trying to understand the mind of Gaudi.

Antony Gaudi grew up in a little town called Reus, which, like Barcelona, was part of a region of Spain called Catalonia. And although he's become one of Spain's most famous architects, Gaudi would never have identified as Spanish. He was Catalonian, through and through. Catalonia has been in the news recently because of its movement for independence from Spain. But in many ways, this movement isn't new. Catalonians have struggled against the rule of the Spanish for centuries. Catalonia has a separate language, Catalan. It has always felt very separate.

That's Geis van Hensbergen. My name is Geisan Hensbergen, I'm the biographer of Antony Gaudi. Van Hensbergen says that as a child growing up in Catalonia, Gaudi spent a lot of time outside and was completely enthralled with the natural world around him. What he would later call the Great Book of Nature. A lot of kids are curious about nature, but for Antony Gaudi it was different. It became a total obsession. He seemed to absorb essential lessons from the patterns and shapes he saw in nature. Just looking at the way the insects were walking and flowers grew, the way that a tree grows and where it throws out branches. A dried out snake skeleton, a honeycomb,

these were nature's perfect constructions. And for Gaudi, a deeply religious Catholic, God was the master architect of these flawless, organic structures. Eventually Gaudi left his small town in the countryside and moved to Barcelona for university and then architecture school. When he graduated in 1878, the director of the school said, we are here today either in the presence of a genius or a madman. Gaudi began his career at a difficult moment in Barcelona. The industrial revolution had brought thousands of workers from the countryside into the city for factory jobs. They were toiling in terrible conditions, packed into filthy

tenements, drinking dirty water. Diseases like yellow fever and cholera were rampant. In the midst of all of this suffering, a bookseller named Josep Bocabella began selling a fundamentalist newspaper. The kind that reminded everyone that their misery was punishment for their sins. Surprisingly, at court on. Pretty soon, Bokabea was making quite a lot of money from his Catholic guilt-themed newspaper.

Which he's squirreled away, kept apparently under, hidden under the tiles of his bookshop. With the piles of money he was accumulating, Bokabea decided to build a church. One meant to inspire the common folk to lead a religious life. The church would be dedicated to Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, the sacred family, Lusagrada Familia. The first architect that Bokovea hired quit after a year, and he went looking for a new one.

Legend goes, Bokovea had a dream one night. The gingerhead blue eyedokobea saw the person from his dream in real life, drawing in the studio of another architect he knew. The man he had seen was Antony Galdie, and immediately Bokobea hired him to be the architect of his church. The greatest job in Spain at that time was given to this almost completely unknown 29-year-old who'd done very little work. The basic floor plan for La Segrada Familia had already been laid out by the former architect, and Gaudi would stick with it.

The church would be built in the Neogothic style, which is popular at the time in Europe. But Galadie also wanted the church to be something completely unique, inspired by nature and by God. What Galadie wanted was a building which would actually have the kind of harmonies of the celestial spheres, the idea of that everything has a harmony in nature.

And that if you got that right in your building, the building itself would spiritualize you. That said, Gaudi would never allow the building to outshine God's creations, so he set a limit on how tall the church would ever get. He felt that he didn't want to be tall than God's handiwork and God's handiwork, where of course the mountains mountains on either side. Lassegradah Familia would be one meter or about three feet, shorter than Mount Manjuic in Barcelona,

just to keep it humble. In 1883, when Gaudi started work on Lassegradah Familia, his first matter of business was to finish the crypt, which had been started by the previous architect. The crypt is essentially a small church under the bigger church and a place where important people are buried. In fact, Joseph Bocabea was buried there when he died in 1892, nine years after he hired Gaudi.

The Cigrada Familia crypt was big enough to hold services in, and this kept everyone happy while Gaudi took his time designing the rest of the building. When Bokobea died, management of the construction passed through various hands, but for Galadhi, there was only one client that really mattered. God is the client and God is never in a hurry. After the Crypt was finished, Galadhi began to build the first big wall of the building, the Nativity facade. He would work on it for the rest of his life, but it was important to him that this facade

get done first, because... It would be the Bible written in stone, which people, if they couldn't even read or write, they could look at the building and be told about the values of the Catholic faith. Gaudi was a sculptor as much as an architect, and the wall would be full of stone sculptures depicting biblical scenes. The baptism of Christ, Christ in the workshop with his father, the flight to Egypt, with a life-sized donkey. The stone sculpture of a donkey in that scene was actually cast in plaster from a real

live donkey. It had to be a particular donkey. He wanted a donkey that looked as if it had been through the desert for 40 days. One of Gaudi's workers actually wandered the streets until he found the perfect starving donkey, which he exactly handed over to Gaudi. He took the donkey and he put the donkey up in a harness. He'd had it chloroformed. And then he cast the whole live donkey. He'd had it chloroformed, and then he cast the whole live donkey. Anthony Gaudi also tried making plaster molds from live human beings.

He actually tried to do with one of his workers, but he almost killed him and decided that maybe that wasn't the best way forward. This all took an incredibly long time, but eventually the wall started to tell a story in stone, and it featured hundreds of celestial and earthly creatures. Little snails crawling all over it and tortoises. The facade became crowded and cluttered and teeming with life. Kind of almost swampish, kind of quality of the stone oozing kind of organic shaping of the building. It was very unusual, very extraordinary.

Antony Gaudi was slowly building a Catholic church, but not everyone was convinced that Catholicism had anything of value to offer the average working citizen. Leftist saw the church as getting rich from the tithes of the poor. They saw them as being wealthy, as being parasitic, as living off them. Communism, socialism, and anarchism were taking hold in other parts of the world, and in Spain, these leftist parties thought they could offer the struggling worker a better life. Conflict between leftists and the state and leftists and the church were a constant. For the last decade of the 19th century, there's probably on average something like two bombs every week in the center of the city. Throughout the years, Gaudi worked

on other architecture projects in Barcelona. His work is peppered all over the city. In palaces, pavilions, and extravagant homes, his sinuous and skeletal architecture was unmistakable. Everyone in Barcelona knew his style. But La Segrada Familia is the project that consumed him. He realized, of course, that he could never finish it and would never see it finished in his lifetime. By 1926, 73-year-old Anthony Gaudi had never married

and was living alone. He spent a lot of nights sleeping in his studio at Las Agrata Familia to obsess with his work to care about his appearance. He was looking a bit like a tramp, actually, because trousers were held up with safety pins and a bit of string. On June 7, 1926, Gaudi is leaving work, and as he crosses the railroad tracks... He forgets to look, and the tram runs him over. Anthony Gaudi was left nearly dead on the railroad tracks.

When his body was found, he was taken to the hospital, Ray died three days later. Gaudi was buried in the crypt under La Segrada Familia. His last years had been consumed with building the church, but Barcelona had not forgotten Caldhi. The wrongs of people came out to mourn. It was guess that almost a quarter of the population of Catalonia turned up in procession, hundreds of thousands of people were there.

When Gaudi died, he left behind a largely unfinished church, which stood was a massive wall, the Nativity Fissade, one tower and the crypt. His colleagues and apprentices would have a lot to do to bring his full vision into being. But Gaudi had anticipated that other architects would finish his work, and he left behind detailed drawings and models outlining exactly how he wanted his magnum opus to be built. For ten years work on Las Gras a familiar continued very slowly.

Much of Gaudi's former team stayed on, even though they could have gone and started their own projects. They were loyal. even though they could have gone and started their own projects. They were loyal. There was still work to be done. The drawings still existed. They continued working away. And then in 1936. The youth of Spain from the North, East, South and West,

go forth to spill the life's blood of their Bella Stanyard. The Spanish Civil War began. The decades old conflict between leftists and the state had finally come to a head. The Republicans who were in alliance of various leftist parties fought against the nationalists, which was an alliance of fascists and other conservatives led by General Francisco Franco. The nationalists also had the support of most of Spain's Catholic clergy. On the 18th of July, two days after the start of the Spanish Civil War, a group of young anarchists

break into the studios of Gaudi and smash everything with hammers. All the models, everything is smashed up into tiny little bits. When they're done smashing, they light the place of place. Everything burns, including the architectural drawings. Absolutely everything. And in fact, the following day, try to come back

and bomb the initivity facade, which is the only work standing there of Gaudes, which miraculously they fail to do. Cophalysis was under attack during the war. And by the end of it, 40 churches in Barcelona had been destroyed, and 12 people associated with the Sagrada Familia Project, including some of its managing patrons and clergy, had been killed. The war ended in 1939, the leftist lost, the fascist won, and General Francisco Franco

took control of Spain. When it was all over, a few workers returned to Gaudi's studio to salvage what they could. They very carefully picked up in boxes, little sections and fragments of the models, and like archaeologists do today, they started piecing them together. For the next couple of decades, the remaining architects and other workers tried to figure out how to move forward on the construction without Gaudi's plans.

But outside the church, there was opposition to moving forward at all. In the 1960s, an impressive group of intellectuals and architects, including L'Augau Bucie and Alvar Alto, wrote an open letter opposing the continuation of Lossagrata Familia. Gaudi wasn't only an architect, they argued. He was an artist, and you shouldn't attempt to finish a work of art without the artist. They felt that this was a total waste of time. They should have left just the original Intivity facade,

almost like a Gothic ruin, there as a homage to Gaudi, and that Gaudi wasn't being well served. But the patrons of the project would have none of it. The building was never supposed to be an homage to Gaudi, they argued. It was always about something bigger. That said, they would try to honor Gaudi's original vision as faithfully as possible, but

it wouldn't be easy. The models and drawings had been the roadmap for how to move forward on the construction, and they were burned and smashed to pieces. And this wasn't just any cathedral. All these years, Gaudi had been designing something so unique, so complex and so completely new, that it would take his successor years to fully get a handle on it. By the 1970s, another huge façade was going up, but the church still had no interior and no roof.

It was just walls and towers, a construction site, open to the rain. I first went to Barcelona in 1977 when I was 20. That's architect Mark Burry. Mark had actually been told in architecture school that Gaudi was not worth studying because his approach was too esoteric. He was too extraordinary and there was no school, meaning that there was nothing to see move along. This just got very more curious, so he went to have a look at the Sograta familiar himself. And my complete accident, I ended up meeting the two 90-year-old architects who were directing the project and they had been young architects listening to

Galdi, explaining his latest discoveries when they were students. The old architects were ready to move on to the interior of the building, but they didn't exactly know how to do it. They knew that he had a system based on geometry and they knew this system worked translating to a kind of building methodology. In other words, the architects knew it was theoretically possible to figure out how to create the rest of the church, but it was a monumental task. They pointed Burry to a couple of boxes. Boxes full of broken models, plans to pair us models, with the invitation to come and join the team

and have a go and untank the mysteries of the models. For a year, Burry worked with the models, trying to extrapolate the geometry of the rest of the church based on the pieces he had. After a year, he'd managed to draw out architectural blueprints for one window. It was a start. Mark Burry didn't stay long at the Sagrada Familia.

He was only 20 and he had to go back to New Zealand to finish school. He returned to work on the church 10 years later and found that when he was gone, a new thing in my bob had been moved into the office, a computer. So I thought these computers must have something to offer because I'd never actually personally touched one. When Burry finally touched the computer, he figured

out that it had architectural software on it. But the software wasn't capable of dealing with Gaudi. Couldn't even go anywhere near what Gaudi was trying to do. The complexity of Gaudi's designs was too much for architectural software of the early 90s. Burry wondered if there was anyone else who designed with similar geometric complexity, and finally he landed on it. People who design airplanes. He started using aeronautical software to figure out an architectural strategy for the interior of the church.

And because I had this very sophisticated software by accident, I discovered parametric design. So we were working parametrically from 1991. Parametric design uses computer algorithms to allow you to plug in different variables and see what the end result is each time you change something. Mark Burry was one of the first architects to use computers to design this way. Though we eventually figured out that Frank Geary's team had also started using aeronautical software to bring Geary's strangely shaped, curvaceous buildings into being. Every year I would go through LA and visit Frank's office and talk to the technical team and compare notes.

Eventually Geary technologies with help from Mark Burry went on to create their own parametric design software, specifically for architects. And by the early 2000s, many of the most exciting new projects in architecture were being done this way. At the forefront of this was a church designed over a century ago by Anthony Galdi, Las Agrada Familia. So from being the sort of anachronism and interesting, but irrelevant, it became actually the lead project in the whole of the digital revolution of architecture. Paramedic design allowed Mark Murray and the other architects to move a lot faster on the interior of the church. Without this technology, it's possible there would still be no inside the sea.

It was only a few years ago, in 2010, that the architects were able to put the finishing touches on the interior. Now people line up around the block to get a glimpse inside. And it really is breathtaking, partly because of these incredibly tall columns that Gaudi designed, that branch out like trees at the top and are capable of carrying a tremendous amount of weight. When people go into that building, I'm not suggesting that it's necessarily always a religious experience, but the shock and surprise of walking in through those doors into this explosion of light. The light pours in through giant stained glass windows.

In the afternoon, it's a red orange light and in the morning it's a blueish green light and it filters through the huge tree-like columns. You feel like you're in a forest. And you feel very tiny. You feel very small. You feel as if there's a whole kind of universe above you. But the building is still not finished. but the building is still not finished. I'm in an extremely loud metal cage elevator that runs on the outside of the church with Hironimo Bouchario,

the architect who you met at the very beginning of the story and Anna Beorby, who handles press for La Sacrata Familia. Everything is very safe here, eh? Yes. It's very safe, Ana says, but it doesn't feel that safe. The elevator is shaking and we can see Barcelona getting smaller below us as we rattle up alongside the towers of the church. The elevator door opens to a spectacular view.

Oh, wow, wow, wow, wow. I'm breathed. They come on all. It's the eye. I'm breathed. We are standing on the top of the Sagrada Familia. We have the part of the there. Barcelona's city blocks stretch out all around us.

To the east, we can see the Mediterranean Sea and to the south, the mountain that Gaudi promised not to surpass. When the building is finished there will be 18 towers including a new one right where I'm standing. This one will be the tallest of all reaching to 560 feet or 170 meters. reaching to 560 feet or 170 meters. Hironimo is working on designing it right now, and he's using the fragments of Gaudi's plaster models to figure out how to do it. These will be Jesus Christ's Tower in the middle,

one of Angeles and the other four. The architects hope the building will be finished in 2026 on the 100th anniversary of Gaudi's death, but there is still a lot to be done. Meanwhile, some of the neighbors seem fed up with Las Agrata Familia and all of the congestion in tourists it brings to the neighborhood. Sometimes there are little protests against the place, like this one in 2011, where locals chanted, the more tourists

come. Over 130 years ago, Joseph Bocabae decided to build flasagradda familia to cleanse the people of Barcelona of their sins and inspire the common folk to live a religious life. He picked a piece of land on the outskirts of the city where cows and goats would sometimes wander. And he probably never imagined that it would become the tourist attraction it is today. Architect Hironimo Bouchario says one of the perks of working at La Sagrada Familia is getting to be inside the church when no one else is there.

For me, it's really special to be alone or to be with not too many people. The church only holds one mass a month right now, and it can be hard as throngs of tourists bump into you with their selfie sticks to feel connected to the building as a place of worship. Hironimo let me come into the church with him in the early morning before it was connected to the building as a place of worship. Hironimo let me come into the church with him in the early morning before it was open to the public so that I could try to get his sense of it. You can feel that it's spiritual and that there is somebody or something more. God is in stands here.

To me, and I'm not a religious person, Lassagrada Familia is not so much a testament to God as it is to humans and what they can create. But Gaudi would dispute that assessment. He once said, the creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create. He discovers. Coming up, we discuss Gaudi's revolutionary models for the last sprout of familiar in a segment that was just too nerdy and dense for the beast itself, but it's, you know, just too cool not to mention it at all. That's right after this. One of the things we mentioned in the piece are these models that were destroyed and how

important they were in realizing Gaudi's vision for La Segrada Familia. And it was just a little too technical to get into in the piece, but Kurt Colstad knows this stuff. And I asked him to come into the studio and explain Gaudi's modeling technique and why it is so important to the creation of Las Grata Familia. Like a lot of architects, especially ones who'd like to use curves, Gaudi actually preferred to work in models rather than drawings. Models helped him experiment with really complex three dimensional structures. And often he would sort of model out structural arrangements, test things out, and then photograph

those models and draw over the photographs. But the models were behind all of this. They were driving the design. And one of the things that he toyed with a lot in models were variations on what's called a catenary arch. Okay, so what is a catenary arch? So a catenary is the curved shape that a hanging chain assumes under its own weight. Basically picture electric line suspended between utility poles. Okay, so you're driving along the highway. You see two utility poles, electric line goes across them and there's that natural bowing of the electrical wire. And that is a catenary arch. Exactly. And that term is actually

derived from the Latin word for chain. And it was already well known by Gaudi's time that an optimal arch shape could be made by mirroring a catenary curve vertically. Basically, you take that hanging curve and you just flip it up and that becomes the model of your arch. And that arch distributes building loads efficiently and a lot of Gothic churches have them. Okay, so that makes sense. You take this bowed chain, it creates the optimal arch when you flip it over and when you're creating churches in the Gothic style, this is a good way to create a good model. But Gaudi took the idea further. He hung strings from other strings, from other strings, and then he added bird shot to wait them down

at structural intersections. And he'd created these huge and intricate wireframe models that ended up looking a bit like chandeliers. And then Gaudi would use mirrors to flip these vertically and study the shapes they created in order to shape his own elaborate building skeletons. And this sounds a lot like what later architects used software for when they did 3D modeling.

Yeah, there are a lot of parallels. In essence, long before parametric design was a computer software problem, Gaudi changed parameters in his models by moving strings and weights around to see how those individual modifications could reshape an entire structure. And then a century later, people came along and finally made these digital programs that could mimic what these handmade models had been doing, allowing architects to see how small changes would ripple out through their entire designs. So, you know, you can imagine they would take like a column and just move it around a little bit, and that deforms like all the other shapes of the structure around it.

Right. And then software you do this and you know, the software cranks along and does its thing. But in Gaudi's time, you would move a weight around and you'd see how the connected set of chains would all kind of deform by adding a little bit of bird shot to one little section. Exactly. And that's amazing. And it looks stunning. Yeah, the results are amazing.

And so, and a lot of people, you know, they think Gaudi and they think of these beautiful sculptural scenes and these details he created. But underneath all of that is this really lovely structural logic. And in Cigarette Familia, those details are beautiful, but so is this internal framework of columns and arches and vaults that branches up and out and creates a kind of fractal forest inside. But because Gaudi didn't spend a lot of time teaching or explaining his methods or really writing about

his designs. And because his work was so out of sync with like what modernists were trying to do at the time, he didn't always get a lot of recognition from the architectural establishment. So he was like a stark attack but in hiding? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, he's that rare stark attack who doesn't spend all of his time bragging about what he does. That's so cool. These models are really stunning. They're amazing to look at. And we have some pictures on our website, correct? Yes, we have a ton of pictures of these models that he made as well as these, you know, the really beautiful church that they helped create. Very cool. Thank you so much. 99% of visible was produced this week by Katie Mingle, Mix Intek production by Sharif

Yousif, Music by Sean Riel. Kurt Colstead is the digital director and the one among us who actually went to architecture school. The rest of the staff includes Avery Trollfum and Emmett Fitzgerald, Delaney Hall, Terran Maza, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to the folks at Las Agrada Familia for spending so much time showing us around. It was a true privilege. For more detail on everything you heard today, check out Guy's Van Hensbergen's new book,

The Sacred Familia, Gaudese Heaven on Earth. We are a project of 91.7KLW in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% of visible as part of Radio Topiaia from PRX, a collective of the best most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by the Night Foundation and our listeners, just like you. You can find 99% of visible and joint discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI Orc, or on Instagram, Tumblr, and

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