SAGRADA FAMILIA, Gaudi's Construction Site

Although his career successfully grew, you should know that the Sagrada Familia became an obsession for Gaudí. The more difficult it was to find funding, the more effort the architect put in, as if he felt compelled to physically devote himself to the growth of his plodding creature. At the end of World War I, he had completed the final designs for the façade dedicated to the Passion of Christ, for which the works would start much later.

The huge semi-abandoned construction site even became his refuge and his challenge: in 1922 he left his house in Güell Park where he lived with his sister, and arranged a small room with a makeshift bed in the middle of the yard. From then on he lived here like a hermit among the dust and materials, keeping watch on its progress and frantically continuing to accumulate drawings, sketches, and models.

At the end of 1925 Gaudí was fortunate enough to see the first tower of the east façade completed (the oldest façade dedicated to the Nativity), followed soon after by the other three. As you can still see today, the towers are decorated below with figures of animals and above with pinnacles that look like trees' shoots and foliage, and have multicolored ceramics inserted which are combined with the words "Hosanna, Sanctus, Alleluia".

The story that I'm about to tell you sadly does not have a happy ending: in June 1926, clumsy and absent-minded Gaudí was run over by a tram and died after an agony that lasted a few days.

He was buried in the crypt of the Sagrada Familia, as an extreme example of an architect remaining at the heart of his creation, almost as if he continues to follow the progress of the construction site. But the troubles were not over yet. Ten years after his death, during the Spanish Civil War, a group of anti-clerical anarchists torched the church under construction. Gaudí's archive went up in smoke, his plaster models were destroyed by swinging bats, and even his tomb was desecrated.

FUN FACT: Gaudí made scores of plaster models for every detail of the Church: pinnacles, fretwork, angel's heads, ornamental curls. Looking at the photographs you'll discover that Gaudí, in his search for absolute realism, would have models pose while hanging on the cross, and he wasn't even content studying the poses of sculptures with mannequins, and procured real skeletons of men and children!