Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia will be completed in 2026
cnn.com
cnn.com
I saw a quote while I was there that was something along the lines of, "Gaudí is not an artist with whom posthumous collaboration is possible." A couple minutes walking around the church is all that's needed to confirm that notion.
Maybe I misunderstand "posthumous collaboration", but the church is literally being built after Gaudi's demise by a bunch of other people, isn't that posthumous collaboration?
Not to mention new materials are available today that are being used and new processes/workflows which change the results slightly too.
Sagrada Familia isn't a 100% implementation of the original vision, as even the original vision was incomplete when Gaudi died.
In this case what they are saying is that Gaudi’s design sense is so unique and iconoclastic that it’s essentially impossible to mix it with other styles of design.
That's what makes it more interesting and fascinating.
Building some great indulgent monument to god wasn't exactly uncontroversial in the political climate at the time, as I understand it.
Anyway, his plans wouldn't have been detailed enough to just go and build it. There was a lot of interpretation to be done in any case.
in contrast other architects worked within a well defined style with rules and systems that can be worked within by modern architects to "posthumously" collaborate. like how you can use the principles of gothic architecture to add a modern addition to a gothic cathedral. the only principle Gaudi followed was natural inspiration and his own interpretation of that, something nobody could ever define
Stayed for 3 hours just to observe the shifting light. I’ll be in Barcelona again on Thurs, can’t wait to go back.
* https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-beauty-d...
See also perhaps longer presentation (50m) from Bp. Robert Barron, "Beauty in the Catholic Tradition":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbfWTlPt8mU
The debate of religion and (forms of) art has an interesting history:
Waiting in line outside was even fun, just looking at all the detail.
I have been to Barcelona 4 times since I was a kid (1998, 2006, 2009, 2014), and every time the Sagrada Familia looked a little more finished, but still far from being completed. It blows my mind that it will finally be completed in 2 years.
Modern architecture has destroyed our cities. It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty, let alone an entire neighborhood. Nothing compared the historic cities of Europe.
In a time when it's cheaper then ever to build, they've not been able to build anything even close to pretty. The best they do is a bad copy of old style.
I remember reading Future Shock when I was quite young and the parts about people changing jobs quite often and living closer to nomads stuck with me, even though I have to say I've forgotten most of the book.
Simply put anything modern is likely to change its purpose many times in the lifetime of the building. A company might have its headquarters in one place for 100 years, but probably not. It may move to a bigger building, be bought and dissolved, or go out of business before the usefulness of the building itself. Having a generic asset is worth more in cases like this.
Same with housing and the 'millennial grey' people point out these days. Most people expect to move many, many times within their lives. I've moved 10 times myself, and I know people that have moved far more than that. A house is rarely looked at like a forever place, and few families seem to keep their houses in the family for multiple generations. Add to this that family size in the US is rapidly shrinking there are a lot of people who know their assets won't be passed on, but sold instead.
> Modern architecture has destroyed our cities. It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty
That's because the things that get preserved are the things that are pretty. You think Romans built their outhouses and warehouses and cheap apartments to look like the colosseum? No, that shit was ugly too, that's why it's not around any more.
This is called "survivorship bias". Don't base your opinions of the past exclusively on the things that survived til now. The things that survived til now are, by definition, the exception to the norm from the time. Not every european building is a work of art, not every Lancaster Bomber avoided being shot in the engines, not all the dinosaurs were animated skeletons.
> Nothing compared the historic cities of Europe.
What do you think Barcelona is?
> In a time when it's cheaper then ever to build
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA.
No. [https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/construction-costs-hit-hig...]
I'd say that's their stated purpose, not their inherent one. Beauty is only useless to those who choose to believe so.
If you're not convinced, I recommend Roger Scruton's "Why Beauty Matters"
It's a hell of a Red Queen thing.
brick and wood alone can't build safely and cheaply over 3 stories
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/mass-timber-is-great-...
brick and wood alone can't build safely and cheaply over 3 stories And the footprint isn't the only thing that's more expensive, all the cool new technologies that your grandparent comment brought up are all more expensive to implement than structures without them. The existence of those technologies implies the existence of skilled professionals to plan and install them. It used to be that you just needed to pay your architect and engineer and builders, now you gotta also pay your crane operators and electricians and plumbers and acoustic consultants, and fire protection experts, and geologists, and network engineers, and energy consultants, and accessibility consultants too and they all want to be paid well for their expertise.
The proliferation of skilled professionals reduces the appetite in the population in general for unskilled manual labor, so that gets more scarce and expensive too. Gotta pay the builders well or else they'll quit and change careers to be one of those professional types.
Add to that the regulatory and compliance requirements that raises the floor of acceptable quality (building MUST be energy efficient, accessible, fire-safe, earthquake-safe, minimally ecologically impactful, etc etc etc) and your wiggle room for where to focus your "quality" budget is pretty tiny and exterior aesthetics rapidly sinks to the bottom of that list.
[disclaimer: I actually disagree with the people who say that new buildings are ugly. I actually like the modernist and international style aesthetics that are artistic declarations of raw functionality. My town has a brutalist city hall where the council chamber juts out in an overhang, so when you walk by you can look at it and say "that funky structural appendix is the exact room where people are making important decisions at this very moment" which I think is cool. This post-modern concert hall just opened a few blocks from me and I think it's pretty sexy: https://wysomusic.org/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2021-11... ]
Can we? Construction is heavily impacted by cost disease.
My friend recently had a house built and the plot of land was around 15% of the cost of the entire project. The land in more premium location would still end up under 30% of total cost.
All those fancy technological advancements did almost nothing to the typical housing construction, it's still a lot of manual work, a lot of specialized tasks (site prep, foundation, frame/structural stuff, roof, insulation, plumbing, sewage, wiring, HVAC, connecting utilities), a ton of waiting, lots of logistics. An enormous amount of babysitting (project management) of the builders, because everything is basically custom/one-off.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-ta... cheaper
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-... scale
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-its-hard-to-innov...
With all those new technologies that increase the efficiency of buildings and construction come technicians who expect to be paid well for their expertise, so for every manual job removed there's an expert who needs to be paid about as much or more to operate or plan the labor-saving technology so implementing the technology may not actually reduce the cost to the builder at all.
For the parts that do still require manual labor, that's been getting a lot more expensive and hard to find, because hand-in-hand with people specializing in all these fancy new technologies, the appetite for manual labor employment in developed economies has fallen, which pushes up the cost of the parts of construction that technologies hasn't changed.
Regulations and requirements have also massively proliferated in the last century. The number of inspections and approvals that any piece of construction needs is pretty crazy compared to the prewar era, plus new requirements and design limitations set by law that, while good for society (anti-fire, disability access), can sometimes drive up costs or limit design choices because ramps take more space than stairs and fire sprinklers represent a doubling of the amount of plumbing work you need to do.
Land has gotten progressively more expensive as it has become more scarce. Sprawl kinda reached the limit of what commuters are willing to tolerate in the 90s, so nobody can do cheap greenfill development anymore (anecdote, my parents had a new house built on the outskirts of Phoenix in 2006, with a 70 minute minimum driving commute, which I would absofuckinglutely never tolerate for myself): you need to buy more expensive interior land to redevelop. God help you if your local land use regulations require you to provide free parking, in which case you may be forbidden from building on as much as 2/3 of that very expensive land you just bought.
Architecture is the only art where you're forced to participate. So we could pretty much say the opposite, buildings should, among other things, contribute to make a place nice. Or at least not make it more miserable.
> What do you think Barcelona is?
Most of Spanish cities are built with crap buildings dating above the 60s. Just concrete blocks, in some cities even with just plain grey and humidity stains. It doesn't matter how historic the city is, because the "historic center" it's just a small spot surrounded by uglyness.
The interior of the small apartments in Pompeii are beautifully decorated, and at the very least more skillfully so than most medieval churches, and we are talking about a small run of the mill rural Italian town.
The reason Roman architecture is gone, is that the christians scrapped them for building materials to build churches, something that still happened until relatively recently (see the Temple of Ceasar pillaged in the late 15th century).
The Colosseum itself is a pretty bad example of architecture left intact, it's literally sawn-off in half.
Not historic. Well some of it is, there is a tiny small town core that dates back to Roman times. The vast majority of the city only dates back to the 1900s. They were just lucky that Gaudi and other great architects practiced then and built landmarks that really should be preserved for as long as we can. Don't make a mistake though, Gaudi and peers built the city we know in the 1900s which isn't very old.
After the new construction code in the early 00s the quality has improved a lot but we still build very ugly buildings.
No wonder why people chose to gather and spend their time where the historial centers are.
Seems architects really refuse to extract some lessons from this.
And I too do joke that it feels colder inside than outside from mid november to mid february.
Do you mean that being habitable without air conditioning is a negative feature?
in a specific climate, sure. but in other climates high ceilings might just be a burden on the air conditioning system
The whole thing feels like the architectural profession became interested in impressing each other with designs that they thought looked cool, and seemed to forget that people actually had to use these spaces. The areas here with buildings from that area usually feel much more dead than areas with buildings from almost any other era.
One of my favorite observations of his is that a modern cheap door isn't even really a door - it's more a simulation of a door than an actual door. It is made of plastic and filled with foam but is made to look like wood and has stiles and rails and fake paneling pressed into the moulding to look like what people think a door looks like. And it comes in a pre-fabricated frame and is installed, not crafted. But it doesn't feel like a door or sound like a door. Just a flimsy thing that closes a passage off. And we admire installers today, not craftsmen.
One thing about him, and I think he acknowledges it, is that efficiency and mass production are why so many more people can live in relatively nice homes today. Not everyone (in fact most people can't) can live in a well crafted home made from the best materials, etc. But I do agree with him that developers could at least try and make things that are rooted in some sense of design principal.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/which-construction-ta... cheaper
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-... scale
So this means you are going to build in ways that are proven and will be up to code. Which leads to the second thing.
Construction materials have become standardized over the last 100 years or so. We went from a world where things were crafted to a world where things are manufactured and installed. Buildings are made mainly of commoditized parts and materials today which makes a lot of things look simplistic and similar. This is good in many ways because when a craftsman was hand carving things they were not very productive and it cost a lot of money. Today, a worker is amazingly productive since their tools are powered and their materials are pre-fabricated and just need to be cut to size.
Lastly, buildings are far more complex today than 100+ years ago. Lots more electrical and plumbing, complex HVAC, insulation requirements, etc. These things were not considered long ago. You had carpentry and maybe a bit of plumbing and some basic electrical.
You can still get really nice custom work done and it's unbelievable expensive.
Also, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I know there was a lot of criticism when the Louvre built the pyramid, but I quite like the contrast of traditional and modern.
Again, this is survivorship bias at best.
The main aesthetic reason new buildings don't look like old ones is Baumol's cost disease, i.e. nobody can hire that many laborers anymore. The second is fire codes and accessibility requirements.
i imagine a similar trend must exist for most of the European cities. people's aesthetic usually rejects the new, but recognizes the beauty once it is seen as old and classic
The same complaint was made when the "pijp" was build, al buildings are the same. It was originally meant for poor people, now one of the hotspots: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Revoluti...
But stil the brownstone building have way more ornaments, arches & other details intended to make it pretty then any modern flat. I have a real hard time believing we will every think of the grey Paris banlieus as pretty: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/05/15/business/GHETTO-1...
You're totally right that France/Italy/Belgium all have amazing towns to visit. But in case someone is looking for a random tip elsewhere: Český Krumlov (https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cesk%C3%BD_Krumlov), which is in today Czechia (handy in case you happen to visit Prague), but used to have a large German population before WWII. It looks wonderful, perhaps the most perfect Medieval town I've seen.
Thinking of old towsn in the UK, many are picturesque, but those old cottages tend to have limited windows and low ceilings make them far less functional by modern standards.
Not that modern concrete architecture is not a blight on our cities, but not all historic buildings were originally as charming as we may see them today.
If anything, we should be emulating the things that survived because on some level we all collectively thought they were worth keeping.
>Many of the buildings we constructed in the second half of the 20th century will be gone in 100 years or so.
It's actually much less than 100 years - more like 30 - but this is actually the problem, the whole "intentionally build things that don't last" thing.
Regarding the Louvre, I think that pyramid looks like a fractal cancer, growing out of what is an otherwise stunning and breathtaking scene. If it were destroyed somehow (perhaps the anti-oil protestors can train their gaze on something other than actual art), no one would care except those who wish to look sophisticated by cheering "modern" "art".
We had to be more parsimonious with the materials at our disposal.
is a picture of the named building. Your link, for me, puts up a beautiful (sandstone?) cathedral.
I have a hard time believing most people will express the same kind of feeling of inspiration they have walking on the old cobblestone streets of for instance France or Italy.
Or take a random Amsterdam outskirt, not famous at all, but lovely: https://www.ehr.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/71011393_5.jpg
I think you'd find that feeling walking the old market streets, covered by cloths to block most of the sun, bees buzzing around the honey vendor, people bustling by. I can't find the perfect picture, but https://i.ytimg.com/vi/M-g876LtXFs/maxresdefault.jpg isn't bad. That one's a little more tourist-focused and lacking in crowds than the exact street I'm remembering.
The "towers in the park" concept works, if the park is not just an artificial green desert. (And the towers are not the underfunded "projects"), for example Hong Kong (the island), with the green mountain and the walkable seaside promenades felt much more livable than even Barcelona.
Hold on, we're talking about Barcelona... The phallus tower (Torre Glòries) certainly has a certain aesthetic ;)
A bit on the more serious side: If you ask city planners, they will probably be able to list thousands of examples of beautiful neighbourhoods in modern cities. They do exist, but I agree that a lot of modern buildings appear quite "soulless" and exchangeable.
You’re looking at an old city built for a relatively small elite over many hundreds of years, and you’re surprised why cities built for many millions of people over a few decade look a bit basic in comparison?
I came across some pre-WW2 photographs of a European city I know, of the more poor districts that don’t often get photographed. You think they looked nice? A modern apartment building looks much better than those cheap wooden shacks and lasts 100 times longer.
I think there’s hope in the long term. My grandmas apartment building was built quickly and cheaply and looked like trash when I was a child. It has since been renovated with a nicer brick facade. Could be better, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Give it a hundred years and compounding refurbishment and survivorship bias will make most cities look great.
- That housing costed more average Ivan wages than the same after the collapse of USSR.
- Most of it wasn't actually sold hence the fun for inhabitants [sic] to prove their right to own it.
If you are wondering what happened after these five years, we moved to another state-provided habitat, this time separate, for a change. All we had to do was put half a year of effort into finishing it to the acceptable quality — all by ourselves — because you cannot exploit other Soviet citizens. Only the state can do that.
And why exactly five years? Because that was the queue wait time for a new living space once you had a child (me) and exceeded a Soviet norm of square meters per human being. And it was Moscow, the capital, where top money was invested into looking good before the eyes of foreign guests.
In the United States, housing is by far the biggest expense for most people, there's a severe shortage of housing, and there's a homelessness problem in most cities. Solving that problem might require a more radical departure from the market based solutions we've been relying on up to this point (and I acknowledge local zoning makes the market less than perfect). Working on the supply side with publicly built housing is something I'd like to see, but the hazard, as you point out, is that it ends up being poorly maintained, overly crowded, and bad.
The failure case in the United States, eg dying of exposure is worse than the failure case was in the Soviet Union, eg being stuck in a really shitty apartment. Another issue is there were probably way more people in that failure case in Russia than there were in the United States. All I'm saying is there's a balance to strike here and public building shouldn't be a tool we ignore.
Think of it as a universal welfare, when there are no market-driven actors to produce better quality goods and services, and everything is just shitty enough to not do harm to consumers.
US homelessness is not caused by shortage of housing. There's tons of cheap housing in US, but people just don't want to live where housing is cheap. California's problems are mostly caused by commie-like government and money they put into non-working social programs. Actually, if they keep doing that for several more decades they may end up in a next level USSR.
Pointless to discuss this if you can't even agree on basic facts.
Now it's controlled by bureaucrats and regulations.
we only have the survivors to admire now
usually the church was more than willing to pay extra for beauty, but the average apartment building or urban mixed-use building built in the last few decades is likely focused on being affordable and efficient.
To a certain extent: economics.
Beauty generally does not show up on a spreadsheet, and when it does it often adds cost. Glass costs less than steel, concrete, or stone, so it's lower CapEx to have glass towers. (Of course glass sucks as a thermal insulator, so your OpEx for heating/cooling may be higher.)
The modern glass curtain wall is popular because it is not load bearing and costs very little extra to hold up. High-rise steel frame was very expensive, and high-rise masonry basically impossible, because the frames also had to bear the weight of their own upper floors. The structural part of a modern skyscraper is basically floors cantilevering off a small concrete core, and the glass wall simply hangs off the cantilever.
I'll take the ugly 70s concrete block I work in nowadays any day. It's _extremely_ difficult to adapt a lot of these old forms to functional, comfortable housing and offices. There are exceptions, but practicality is a big part of the change.
You're also seeing a certain amount of survivor bias in many cities; the old buildings that are still around are the ones that someone thought it would be worthwhile to keep around.
Other explanations, survivor bias, population boom, ... are fundamentally wrong because even though they may have ab after the fact rationalization, they were not the instincts that animated this revolution.
We're turning out of it, finally, luckily.
But I have no expertise in construction nor history so can't say if that's true.
But really, just because it was _cheap_ an _easy_ for a machine, therefore it meant it was _aspirational_, _desirable_ for a human. That is the core shift, it was primarily ideological (and we rationalized this new mindset _after_ it already reified itself).
Art Nouveau, Gaudí’s dialect being Modernisme, was a movement which aimed to democratise and modernise architecture and design compared to previous periods.
It's almost completely a contemporary project.
https://hyperallergic.com/152158/has-gaudis-sagrada-familia-...
https://sagradafamilia.barcelona-tickets.com/sagrada-familia...
"Spanish Civil War: In 1936, during the civil unrest, anarchists broke into the cathedral and stole the plans, and destroyed the church's crypt. Work only resumed after the unrest ended in 1939. The informational remains were pieced together to make Sagrada Familia what it is today."
That quote of yours don't seem to be a verbatim quote?
"Spanish Civil War: In 1936, during the civil unrest, anarchists broke into the cathedral and stole the plans, and destroyed the church's crypt...."
I've seen the Sagrada familia, and it ain't small!
But colloquially, Sagrada Familia is what most people would consider a cathedral.
There can be, though it's not common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-cathedral
> Although known as the "Basilica of St Denis", the cathedral has not been granted the title of Minor Basilica by the Vatican.
A basilica on the other hand is an honorific title granted to some churches by the pope for historical/religious reasons.
An interesting note: Saint Peter in Rome, the most famous church in the christian world is not a cathedral itself as it is not where the pope has its seat, that's actually another basilica in Rome, Saint John Lateran, which makes it the most important church in the catholic hierarchy with the title of "Omnium Urbis et Orbis Ecclesiarum Mater et Caput", or "Mother and leader of all the churches in the world".
Saint John Lateran is also not in Italy [1] due to an extraterritoriality treaty in 1929, part of the same treaty that established Vatican City. By the way, that church is exactly 1700 years old this year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archbasilica_of_Saint_John_Lat...
In short, the "major" is reserved for four top churches in Rome. "Minor" is used to signal that the church is of significant importance, but not as important as the major ones. It's not related to the size at all :)
Seems like the four major basilicas have historical (maybe even pre-Schism?) associations, while the minor ones are designated by the pope.
There may not be enough institutional knowledge at CNN about Catholicism that the editors would know that there is a difference between a basilica and a cathedral.
This is the sort of thing that the folks at GetReligion.com were trying to address: not advocating any particular religion, but helping newsrooms ‘get’ religion, in the senses of understanding it and of not getting things wrong. The example at https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2023/12/29/why-we-di... is a really good one: the New York Times in 2014 published ‘the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus is buried.’ There was no-one on the editorial team that handled that article who knew enough about Christianity to know that Christians don’t believe Jesus is buried anywhere.
Colleges, especially large ones, do have tons of students of different faiths, but I felt contacts were still minimal. My randomly-assigned freshman year room-mate was a devout Christian and would sing in worship - super wonderful guy. But after that, not much. It's so easy to just hang out with people similar to you - at all stages of life.
Even when you meet someone of a certain faith, you're likely to experience that interaction through holiday, festival, food, dress and so on - think asking a Muslim about Ramadan or being invited to a Hanukah party - but you're not likely to ask doctrinal or theological questions.
And that's before you even get into pro-cathedrals and things...
70% of Ireland is nominally Catholic, and look at the confusion over this, say: https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2023/06/22/dublin-...
Like, the church had to come out and clarify that Dublin didn't have a cathedral.
But still I think these are bad examples. If asked before this thread I would have said sagrada familia is a cathedral. But that's out of ignorance about that building, not about what a cathedral is. The dublin confusion looks similar to me: those people may know well what a cathedral is and just thought the pro-cathedral was one.
Nah, some event, I assume. It's a big church in the city centre, and I'd assume it has virtually no parishioners these days, so wouldn't surprise me if they use it for other stuff.
You can see it directly in church architecture. Compare Catholic Church interiors from the early 20th century and ones now. Now do the same comparison for Orthodox ones. It’s clear that the former desperately don’t want to be Catholic anymore.
The seminarians have shifted very far ideologically away from the cohort who moved the altars, ripped out communion rails, and stripped the ornamentation. That's pretty much consistent with the cohort of Catholics who attend mass weekly (a bare minimum requirement).
Those rails, altars, and decorations are being renovated back into place in some places.
And it’s not only administrivia, for example only half of US Catholics have heard about transubstantiation and only a third believe in it. [1]
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/05/transubst...
The USCCB is trying to work on this, we're almost 2 years into a 3-year Eucharistic "revival" (that word has weird connotations for me, but it's the word they used), https://www.eucharisticrevival.org/
That's a startling figure, but I've been out of the church for a while. I recall that being taught during first communion and confirmation.
For most, faith and culture are intertwined as they go about their day. You fast because of course you do, not because you know the thousand-year history of that practice and the relevant scriptural phrases.
The only other country I can think of that comes close would be Poland, if that counts as Western.
Of course today few in Europe would go to war over religious differences. The world has changed (for the better unless by odd chance you happen to be the same religion as me - note I do not state which religion that is - this omission makes this a statement you can agree with whereas if I stated the religion you would disagree)
If that trivia was that a cathedral is required to make a city, or that the presence of a cathedral makes a place a city, then that is _wrong_, though commonly believed. It was the case during the 16th century, kind of (Henry VIII did it) but it became far messier after that; by the 19th century non-cities with cathedrals and cities without cathedrals both existed.
Change two words in your opening sentence and the rest reads like the system is working as intended!
I find it shocking that writers there have heard different words for "big impressive Catholic church" but lack the intellectual curiosity to learn the difference. Words are what they deal in all day.
Getting the difference between a Cathedral and a Basilica wrong is also not an example of "news media being anti-religion" because most religious people, including probably most American catholics, hardly know the difference since it's a piece of nomenclature that only matters if for some reason you've been charged with buying the right ceremonial hat for the guy in the back office.
Obviously they should correct it, because it's journalism's job to educate people, but I would stay far away from claiming it's any kind of institutional hostility to religion to make a typographical error or repeat a common misconception. Newspapers make these kinds of minor errors about all topics all the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/reader-center/corrections...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/10/quarter-christia...
However fact still remains that a huge number of people who consider themselves Christian do not believe in the resurrection, and that in itself makes it entirely reasonable to word things that way whether you agree that those people are Christian or not.
I think this is more a minor phrasing thing than anything: "where many Christians believe that Jesus was buried".
Pitt didn't call their big building the Cathedral of Learning because their equivalent of a bishop in their organizational hierarchy sits there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilicas_in_the_Catholic_Chur...
This isn’t me trying to be edgy, I like cathedrals, this one (and his general style) just left me cold. Duomo in Milan was far better imo.
I just was on one of those "middle aged friend couples go to Europe" trips. Most of my world travel has been solo, and I like to briskly walk around for miles and miles and just see how the city is laid out. "Slowly shambling around cathedrals" was much of the trip, so I was frequently irritated on that trip, particularly so at Sagrada Familia as it must have been the 12th cathedral we shambled around in 3 days.
We would travel well together. My wife and I usually do this. We regularly clock up 20-25km a day of just walking around a city, often for 3 or 4 days in a row. We will happily walk from the centre out the the suburbs. From the far west to the far east of a city. We'll retrace our steps and then take a right that looks vaguely interesting. We only start to use the transit system to get further out or when we are short on time.
Milan's Dom isn't that impressive to me, but perhaps that's because I've seen more grand, old churches, and the Sagrada Familia felt like something different.
tourist attraction is always gonna feel like a tourist attraction i guess
Granted, the LOTR of Lothlorien helped, too (I only saw the Sagrada Familia in 2022). To past generations, "Gothic" means something quite different, as we see it in our current context, with darkened fronts and comparisons to buildings that allow even more glass. But back then it was all light and organic. The SF seems to go in the same direction, but unhindered by medieval masonry and mathematics.
Then again, I also like brutalist churches...
If it were not for the glass the interior would feel like a sixties community centre.
The exterior, a roughly shaped mound of excrement with some ornate extrusions. :)
Compare Chartes in France, Firenze in Toscana or the mosque-cathedral of Cordóba and you have entirely different styles in and out.
I like the Sagrada Familia for its singularity but it indeed looks like it has been created by a child with modeling compound.
It’s possible, even likely, that the pictures don’t do it justice, so I will take a look in person at some point, but I don’t have high hopes.
Like the Mezquita in Córdoba, it's hard to get a sense of how intensely all the combined elements make an impression just from photographs.
Gaudi himself was deeply religious; this wasn't just the church commissioning a famous architect for the sake of it or anything. It was very much a labour of love for him, AIUI.
Also I’m not sure if it’s really Gaudí’s work, for example how the altar is way forward is an innovation from the 1970s.
The two temples and all the subsequent churches from the time of Solomon up to and including the nineteenth century may have looked radically different in terms of architectural style, but what they had in common is that they were unambiguously constructed for offering propitiatory sacrifices to God.
Churches built after that are instead built for offering a meal to mortal humans. If that’s not a secular activity, then it’s one of a completely different religion. In fact the transformation of the twentieth century was a far more radical change than the one going from the old to the new covenant, in that it has rejected both of them.
Of course like all the other new age hippie nonsense that came from that century it will eventually fall out of fashion, just like Arianism eventually did despite the Church apparently being completely overcome with it. The question is just how long it will take.
As another comment suggested, I think it's the crowds and the commercialism. It might as well have been erected inside Disney World. Maybe I'm insensitive, but it takes more than the literal/physical art (the building itself) to move me.
Edit: For example, just walking around the Gothic Quarter at night was a significantly more moving, cathartic, or "timeless" experience for me.
Also, it was nice, but I have no clue what the adulation in this thread is about. It's just a huge church with a lot of stone and colored glass.
Before the modern era constructing expensive religious buildings could perhaps be justified, but after the 1800s people ought to have known better and these can't lay claim to represent the city as earlier projects could. It belongs in the same category as the castle at Disneyland.
Same goes for the few other gaudi buildings I peeped at, as well as park guell. I can understand how their design in the late 19th/early 20th century would be very novel, but it all just seemed merely whimsical rather than inspiring or thought provoking.
If we're comparing late 19th century basilicas, Sacre Coeur takes top billing in my book.
FWIW I find everything made by Gaudi to be completely grotesque.
I don't care about the groupthink: to each its own bad tastes.
https://www.archdaily.com/964178/from-handcrafted-stone-to-3...
One moment, only trees. The next, La Sagrada Familia.
To stand there, before the century of brilliance and determination that combined to create this mass of stone and glass, on the edge between nature and society, and see, and sense that I too am seen, was one of the great privileges of my life.
To Gaudí, and his countless collaborators…thank you.
There's some pushback from the neighbors because finishing it all means bulldozing hundreds of apartments, although those apartments were bought at a discounted price decades ago because everyone knew they had an expiration date. And now that it's here, they want to keep their apartments even though they were told about the Sagrada Família from the start.
PS: Gaudí's name is Antoni, in Catalan. Not Antonio. He was a proud Catalan, he was arrested for talking in Catalan.
Quite understandable as well. The thing is big enough as it is. Bought at a discount or not, bulldozing that many homes in an overpopulated city that already struggles for space due to its geography is a little ludicrous.
We build and build depressing neighborhoods in cities for us to all flee to historical centres to experience beauty for a minute. I mean if you are in the US you are lost anyway, but the Europe has some beautiful cities (Amsterdam, Venice, Palma, Rome, Vienna the list continues), but none of them are modern.
The citizens should be helped to find replacement, but please let's put some beauty back in our cities and give prominence to Gaudi's architecture (although maybe it's not the prettiest it's at least fun)
stop treating us like some kind of zoo animals. The reason why the old tenaments were demolished is because their living conditions brought fire, disease, and discomfort with them.
I mean... It's right there, you can't miss it. It's not like it's currently particularly well-hidden.
For instance Berlage in Amsterdam is modern in your classifcation. And his buildings grace Amsterdam, but most people would consider them "older", he was living around the same time of Gaudi.
I think you may have severely underestimated the population growth and need for housing after WWII. The world had not seen population growth like that before. The US and Europe cast away their ornate designs and focused on a burgeoning population in the US and rebuilding quickly in Europe.
Probably has to do with utilitarian and post-modernism; and a general deconstructionism of beauty; which is nice as a philosophy but just not inline with the general experience of a human. On top of that, architectural ego's make it worse.
Let alone Canada & Northern US, they combine it with a terrible city planning strategy, moving most utitilities such as shopping, entertainment & parcs, to a mall only reachable with car. Calgary must the most depressive unlivable city I've ever visited.
Everything produced last decade is either boring and uninspiring for instance:https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2GMG3GJ/new-modern-apartment-block..., or has to be weird and original in the "brand" of the Architect (for instance Rem Koolhaas).
I feel it's like those people that buy a house near an airport, they pay pennies for it, and then start lobbying the government for a change in air traffic routes.
It's bizarre that at the same time, real estate investors think all value increases are rightfully theirs, but they should be protected from any decrease in value.
You can hardly call it 'investing' if you're protected from the downsides.
There's definitely an argument to be made that globally iconic feats of architecture have intrinsic value that's more important than a bit of housing. But you do need to account for the social impact of aggravating housing scarcity to make that argument.
Nimbyims? This is corporate capitalism at its finest. Private profits, socialized and externalized losses.
As far as I understand, only one building (many flats though) would have to be removed in order to fit the staircase.
Problem is that there isn't a lot of space available to put the people whose home you just removed, so seems unlikely to happen unless our local government suddenly solves some really hard problems.
So while in general the whole "touristic flat rentals" stuff is clearly hurting the city, maybe over-dramatizing the impact isn't super useful. Overall the situation sucks though, as prices seems to still go up :/
In my part of Eixample there aren't any long term units available.
It is incredibly rare for a large cathedral to be completed just like the original architect envisioned it, without any compromises made along the way*. It may even be said that a large cathedral is never finished - all the large cathedrals have a standing team of builders, usually with a tradition going back to the middle ages, and require constant maintenance work. "Finished" is thus a difficult term for such a building. But if major construction will stop in 2026, with the building no longer having any obvious large missing parts, I am totally fine with calling it "finished", even if the original plans were different. My understanding is that they already deviated from the original plans decades ago.
* I think Cologne cathedral was completed more or less according to the original plan, but only because historism was en vogue and they found the original medieval plans by chance in the 19th century. Strasbourg cathedral is a good example for a cathedral which doesn't look at all like the original architect envisioned it, with a long history of re-planning and some aesthetically botched construction works.
Yes, a lot of models and plans Gaudi created for Sagrada Familia were incomplete when he died. It didn't help either that his studio(s) were ransacked during the civil war, so even if he had a 100% vision, the war would ensure those plans didn't survive.
Well, I would say this point becomes moot if they didn't have a permit for it from a start.
Also there are laws that are likely to supersede any expiration date that was set by who knows who in a different era.
Everything south of the text 'Gloria' in this picture is apartments right now. The main entrance to the basilica effectively has no approach.
So they will be working on this for 200 years. The only institution that could survive that long is the catholic church.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gilfranco-Alves/publica...
It's interesting using computational tools to finish something in spirit, that started long before their mainstreaming.
Also great to see Christianity's best days of building cathedrals (basilicas) didn't end 500 years ago (and I'm not even religious).
We did visit Park Guell, though, on that same day, which was less crowded, and that was incredible.
If you haven't been to Barcelona, it is an amazingly beautiful city. We only spent one day there, which is far too little to do the city justice.
Impressive sure, but in the way of "Wow, there is a lot of work in this weird thing"
After witnessing the architecture of both ancient and (relatively) modern Eastern/Southeastern structures, I found the Sagrada Familia lacking. It came across somewhat soulless with its bleached cavernous interior and uninspired stained glass artwork.
That came across harsher than I truly feel, but I think it's garnered some undeserved hype especially after 100 years of construction. I wonder what structures inspired Gaudi that may be lost to time, and what feelings he wanted to evoke in me that I didn't experience during my visit.
Barcelona is full of obvious and hidden examples of Gaudí‘s humanity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_Cathedral took six centuries, although they started and stopped a few times.
Also Liverpool is one impressively sized cathedral.
I will have to travel there to see it in real life once it is done. Construction over such a long span is impressive.
The design looks fragile. I will have to find some better photos.
The reputable press for some reason spread fake news about the fact that the Sagrada Familia is supposed to be finally completed by 2026.
This is complete nonsense, I can't understand how it happened. Apparently, one person stepped in and everyone else happily picked up on it.
In fact, by 2026 it is planned to complete only the central bell tower, the Jesus Tower, which will make the temple the tallest in the world, and the corner Chapel of the Ascension. After that, there will remain such a "small, insignificant detail" as the construction of the central facade of the basilica. It is planned to work on it until 2034 (if everything goes according to plan, the builders cunningly add in this place).
And, only then will the discussion be started about the construction of the stair bridge leading to the entrance, which requires demolishing a block of living buildings on Mallorca Street, imagine the friction at this point..
So, no, it's not going to be finished in 2026. But that doesn't make it a penny less marvelous, one wouldn't even notice it's not finished.
Is this 'completed' or 'cut the features and call it done'
You are repeating the words of Judas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_Supercomputing_Cente...