UNGODLY
No modern city is as strongly identified with a single structure as Barcelona. Basílica de la Sagrada Família is its unofficial emblem, and its architect, Antoni Gaudí, its unofficial patron saint. Images of the famously unfinished church are splashed across every kind of merchandise, from artisinal t-shirts and silk scarves to cell phone batteries and one-Euro chocolate bars. A visit is the central experience on the tourist route, like a visit to Ground Zero is in New York. Tickets to the tower observatory cost 29 Euro, the equivalent of 29 city subway rides. Yet the city’s mission to complete construction of the building, whose foundations were laid over a century ago, doesn’t seem crassly commercial. It seems daft, and slightly heroic.
When we visited, on a weekday morning, the church’s front facade was draped with nets and scaffolding, and its interior rang with the whine of drills and saws. The front and side facades of the building, which were built first, under Gaudí’s direct supervision, have weathered majestically. Their stone is darkened and roughened, and the richness and detail of the statuary feels Medieval. But those parts of the facade more recently constructed, although to Gaudí’s design, look more like computer renderings. The blocks here are smooth and taut, with little fine-grained embellishment. No doubt Gaudí, when alive, worked closely with masons so that each block was carved to his specifications before it was raised. There’s no way to know, or match, his vision.
The church was consecrated in 2010, and there are rows of folding chairs cordoned off in the nave for parishioners. It’s hard to imagine a less serene, private, or spiritual space than the church on a weekday morning. There are throngs of tourists, guides and church employees roaming about, and an orgy of selfie-taking. Sunlight streams through the stained glass windows, splashing the floor with cartoon-bright patches of red, green and yellow. The columns and capitals, newly finished, have a kooky kinetic energy, but little authority or mystery. This place simply doesn’t feel like a church; it feels like a playground.