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.
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.
FWIW I find everything made by Gaudi to be completely grotesque.
I don't care about the groupthink: to each its own bad tastes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.