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It takes a few seconds to register before you enter this architectural icon, because even from the outside, the effect is striking, and something in your brain hesitates before it can process what your eyes are doing: looking up. Always up. The towers pull you there whether you want to go or not.<\/p>\n
After 144 years, the cathedral is finally finished. The Sagrada Fam\u00edlia, Gaud\u00ed\u2019s inconceivable church in the middle of Barcelona, reached its full height earlier this year when the last major structural element (the tallest tower) was completed: a cross, placed atop the Tower of Jesus Christ in February, bringing the total height to 566 feet\u2014the tallest church on the planet.<\/p>\n
Pope Leo XIV, the eleventh pope to have reigned since the whole project began, will lead a Solemn Mass on Wednesday and formally inaugurate the final tower. A ceremonial blessing. One hundred years to the day from Gaud\u00ed\u2019s untimely death (a trolley hit him), which is either a remarkable coincidence or very careful scheduling. Probably the latter.<\/p>\n
The cross itself is not a small object. Roughly the height of a five-storey building, somewhere around 100 tons, fabricated in Germany and shipped to Spain in 14 sections, then lifted by crane to a workshop sitting 200 feet in the air directly over the central nave. Workers up there finished the pieces by hand, with stone interiors, enamelled white ceramic cladding, and windows made from locally sourced glass. It reflects sunlight during the day. At night it\u2019s lit up. Gaud\u00ed had wanted exactly that, apparently, which is either a sign of his total vision or the kind of detail that gets added to the mythology after the fact.<\/p>\n
The architect in charge of the cross, Mauricio Cort\u00e9s, is Mexican and talks about the project with the measured calm of someone who has spent years negotiating between a dead genius and a functioning building code. The stainless steel is not something Gaud\u00ed would have used \u2014 the material barely existed in usable form during his lifetime \u2014 but it kept the structure light enough, actually, to work. \u201cThe times have changed,\u201d Cort\u00e9s said, walking through the basilica. \u201cThe technology has evolved, as have the regulations.\u201d He seemed unbothered by the compromises. Most people working on the project seem to have arrived at a kind of peace with them.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s worth saying is that this is genuinely not a simple building to look at. The geometry is uncomfortable in the best sense. Gaud\u00ed\u2019s reverence for natural forms, the way a bone curves, the way a tree distributes weight, runs through every surface, and standing inside is less like standing in a cathedral and more like standing inside something alive. The roof of the central nave breaks into colour. Ceramics on the gables, Venetian glass on the pinnacles, the bell towers on both the Nativity and Passion facades reading as dense, dense visual narratives in carved stone.<\/p>\n
The beatification question is hovering over this week\u2019s visit. Gaud\u00ed was declared Venerable last year, and it\u2019s suspected \u2014 widely, in the Barcelona press at least \u2014 that Leo XIV may announce his beatification during the ceremonies. One step from sainthood. Peter Stanford, who wrote the biography Gaud\u00ed: God\u2019s Architect and spent three months working with the beatification committee, describes an abundance of claimed miracles, hips and otherwise, and a Vatican that has apparently signed off on at least one of them as inexplicable. \u201cThe Pope could declare him blessed by the church\u2019s own rules,\u201d Stanford said, \u201cor the Pope also has the power to chuck the rules out the window and just call him a saint.\u201d That\u2019s not a sentence you often hear about an architect.<\/p>\n
The original plans for the church were largely destroyed in the 1930s. Everything built since has required a kind of forensic interpretation, a reading of fragments, drawings, and models, made increasingly precise by computer-controlled stone-cutting and the accumulated expertise of the people who\u2019ve spent their working lives on the undertaking. There\u2019s a whole tradition of it now. An institutional memory that serves as a substitute for documents that no longer exist.<\/p>\n
Wars. Funding gaps. Politics. The delays were never really mysterious. A project this size, in a city that went through what Barcelona went through, was always going to have an uneven history. What\u2019s incredible is that it got finished at all. Or close enough to have the Pope come and say Mass.<\/p>\n
Photo: Barcelona\u2019s Sagrada Fam\u00edlia, by Alberto-g-rovi<\/p>\n