For a moment I have the Sagrada Familia to myself.
Not the whole basilica, mind you—its 16,000 daily visitors hum on the other side of a curtain that reserves this corner of the apse for prayer. It isn’t silent, but it seems like it is. Numberless languages melt into one another, like the colors streaming through gothic windows above. From the pillars framing the windows, bemused cherubs look down, bathed in red-orange light: childlike faces, lips slightly parted, as if they had just recognized me.
Antoni Gaudí’s still-unfinished basilica is usually described with superlatives: astonishing, overwhelming, jaw-dropping. All entirely apt. But what sets the Sagrada Familia apart from other marvels of modern architecture that show off the daring things one can do with steel and reinforced concrete is that it makes room for me. The Sagrada Familia, to be sure, is not a humble building. The four-armed cross placed atop its central tower earlier this year gives it the tallest church spire (at 566 feet) in the world. But it is not an inhuman building, either. It is a space where one can feel loved.
A month or so before I visited the Sagrada Familia, I was asked to consult on plans for a new church to be built in Rome. The architect’s portfolio was all angles and emptiness. There were, I am sure, aesthetic and theological points he was trying to make, but it seemed more the idea of a church than a church. The same critique applies to much modern art. Nail a urinal to a wall and ask, “Is this art?”—I can appreciate the question, but I think the viewer has the right to answer, “No.” It is, at most, philosophy of art.
Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) was a quintessentially modern architect—innovative and provocative, he is the best exemplar of the Catalan version of art nouveau known as Modernisme. After Gaudí’s death, Salvador Dalí claimed him for surrealism. But compared with even his closest peers, Gaudí walked his own path. The astonishing technical innovations of the past century—developments in engineering, materials and computer modeling—have made mind-bending architectural effects possible: Taipei 101 evokes an enormous bamboo shoot; the Burj Al Arab unfurls like a sail of glass and steel; the deck of Singapore’s Sands Hotel perches like a boogie board atop three towers bent like half-shuffled playing cards.
These buildings overwhelm with chutzpah and skill; all produce a wow. But that’s it. They create their effect. We are impressed. Gaudí does something more.
Officially named the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, the church was commissioned in 1881 by the Association of Devotees of St. Joseph, a lay association founded in 1866 to counteract the 19th century’s secularizing revolutions. Gaudí took over the project from the Archdiocese of Barcelona’s official architect shortly after—before even its crypt had been completed—and in the century since his death other artists and architects have labored to complete it. But the Sagrada Familia’s message remains unmistakably Gaudí’s.
The building certainly produces a wow—cascading wows. Just counting the honeycomb towers spiraling skyward makes one dizzy. Once inside, it feels as if one’s neck is replaced by a hinge because it is impossible not to stare upward. Its columns are like a redwood forest, its walls of light like the vision of a prophet. But the work of art that the Sagrada Familia brings to my mind dates from the 13th century: the Tree of Life mosaic in Rome’s Basilica of San Clemente. Tendrils curl across the half dome of San Clemente’s gilded apse, rising from the foot of the cross; scattered among the swirling vines are images of shepherds, noblemen, farmers, fishermen, scribes, monks, musicians—the sundry denizens of medieval society. There is a place for everyone, even birds and fish and animals.
The Sagrada Familia is Modernisme at its apex, but it is equally gothic and baroque. The layout of the church expands on the traditional gothic concept of its first architect, Francisco de Villar (1828-1901); the only part of the church completed within Gaudí’s lifetime, its Nativity facade, is exuberantly baroque. Gothic was Gaudí’s favorite style, though he faulted the great medieval cathedral-builders for their reliance on flying buttresses, which he thought weighed down structures with extra stonework and cast shadows across their windows.
The Sagrada Familia’s uniquely shaped columns, which branch out at the top like trees, more evenly distribute the weight of its roof and towers so that it does not press outward on the walls. With no buttresses casting shadows, light streams unimpeded through stained glass, dancing through the columns like sunshine through a forest. But Gaudí did not see himself as overcoming the gothic. He was not leaving an artistic patrimony behind but bringing it to fulfillment.
The Sagrada Familia breathes freshness, but it would be misleading to call the building revolutionary. The church, after all, was built as an act of reparation for violence committed against the Catholic Church by socialist and anarchist revolutionaries, and Gaudí’s religious fervor only grew as he devoted himself to the project. Once, stopped by the authorities and asked if he was armed, he replied, rather recklessly, “Of course I am!” He reached into his pockets to pull out a fistful of rosaries, thundering, “These are my arms!”
In addition to being a fervent Catholic, Gaudí was also a convinced Catalonian nationalist, who once spent a night in jail for refusing to speak Spanish to a policeman. He saw his work as preserving a cultural and religious heritage rather than overthrowing it. “Originality,” he liked to say, “means returning to the origin.”
The names of other pilgrimage sites from across the world—from Jerusalem and Lourdes to Guadalupe and Kibeho—are written on the basilica’s windows because it is a part of a larger narrative. And narrative seems the right word. Modern architecture often aims to create an effect, to make a point or to establish a principle. Gaudí’s buildings tell a story—sometimes a lot of stories, like a cross between a Dickens novel and Where’s Waldo? You discover something new each time you visit: Longinus’s piercing spear, a tortoise holding up a pillar, onlookers with hands raised in astonishment at the preaching of the boy Jesus.
Cast in a different light by the changing seasons, long-familiar stories become new each time they are told. And somehow, amid all those intersecting narratives and the quirky ornamentation, we feel as if our story is a part of it as well. The scale of the basilica is such that even though its towers soar toward heaven, they do not feel distant. The Sagrada Familia makes room for us, then points us higher.
•••
June 10, 2026, will mark the 100th anniversary of Antoni Gaudí’s death, which Pope Leo XIV plans to commemorate with a visit to the Sagrada Familia. By the time he died at age 73, the architect’s life had taken on an almost hermetic quality. He had moved onto the building site at the Sagrada Familia, ate frugally and paid so little attention to his clothing and appearance that when he was hit by a tram while on his way to confession—Gaudí was in the habit of confessing daily—he was mistaken for a beggar and sent to a hospital for the indigent. He died three days later.
Gaudí, no doubt, had a curmudgeonly side. He was stubborn, not overly concerned with social niceties—nor, as the years progressed, with following Barcelona’s zoning regulations—but to be otherwise would probably have rendered him a lesser visionary. He inspired fierce loyalty among his workers, finding jobs for them even when they grew elderly and putting up a school for their children on the Sagrada Familia grounds.
When he was hired to take over the Sagrada Familia project in 1883, Gaudí was an untested and practically unknown 31-year-old. At the time, Barcelona was experiencing an architectural moment much like what the Italian Renaissance was for art in Florence: an economic boom with patrons hungry to attach their names to prestigious buildings combined with a near-miraculous overflow of talent. As Gaudí made his name on better-paying private commissions, the Sagrada Familia, reliant entirely on donations, remained in the background.
Gaudí’s prestige reached its apex in 1906 with the construction of a house for Josep Batlló, a wealthy textile manufacturer. The building shows off Gaudí’s eclecticism and penchant for melding narratives; it is a trip to the Mediterranean and a retelling of the legend of St. George, Barcelona’s patron. Colorful plates and fragmented tiles give its facade an aqua tint, a crustacean surface and hints of fish scales or bubbles ascending. Inside, its corridors undulate like waves.
The building’s oceanic motif merges dreamlike into a tiled rooftop that curves like the scaly back of a dragon; this dragon’s back is pierced by a slender tower and cross representing St. George’s spear. The saintly knight and his fire-breathing foe were already a theme in the ornamentation of other buildings on the same block—all designed by Gaudí’s architectural rivals. Gaudí one-upped them by fusing the narrative into his building’s structure.
The ivory-colored balconies of Casa Batlló have a skeletal quality, like the jaws of an eel or the bones of the dragon’s victims. Some critics have found Gaudì’s eclecticism busy or disconcerting. He abhorred a straight line. But his creations mirror the restless energy of life itself. Gaudí saw God as the greatest architect—he loved nature, especially the Catalonian countryside—and wanted his work to imitate the order of creation. Skeletons especially fascinated him because these are the body’s load-bearing columns. Inside Casa Batlló, passing through the churning arches of the attic, one feels like Jonah in the belly of the whale.
As he was finishing Casa Batlló, Gaudí began work on an apartment building down the street, Casa Milà, popularly known as La Pedrera (the quarry) because of its heavy (though strangely wavy) stone facade. On this commission, Gaudí ran into problems—disagreements with the building’s owner, cost overruns, conflicts with city planners. If one looks closely at the curving cornices atop the building, one sees the word Ave emerging from the stone. Gaudí’s plans called for rooftop statues of Mary and the Christ child surrounded by angels, but in 1909 Barcelona underwent a paroxysm of anti-Catholic violence. Churches and convents were torched; the corpses of nuns were disinterred and paraded through the streets; priests were killed. Pere Milà, Gaudì’s patron, did not want his building to become another target of anarchist violence and nixed the religious imagery.
The incident increased the urgency Gaudí felt to complete the great expiatory temple slowly rising a few blocks away. Gaudí’s Catholic faith had grown over the years, fed by the social teachings of Pope Leo XIII and the liturgical writings of Dom Prosper Guéranger and steeled by family tragedy; he had lost his mother and four siblings by the age of 27 and spent years caring for an elderly father and an alcoholic niece. La Pedrera would be Gaudí’s last secular commission. He could no longer separate his religious and his artistic vision. The rest of his life was dedicated to the Sagrada Familia.
•••
Antoni Gaudí left behind almost no writings, and many of the stories about him were tinged with legend even in his lifetime. His message is in the buildings. But what is Gaudí’s message?
Six centuries before Christ, the prophet Ezekiel preached of a cosmic temple to the remnant of Israel exiled in Babylon. Ezekiel’s message was endurance in the face of defeat and hope for a future whose glories would surpass what had been destroyed. Some of that same hope suffuses Gaudí’s expiatory temple. When anarchists took over Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, the Sagrada Familia was desecrated and barely escaped dynamiting; a dozen of Gaudí’s collaborators on the project were murdered. The theology of atonement and expiation is woven into the basilica’s DNA. But expiation is only a beginning.
In the Book of Revelation, John sees a city of light with no need for sun or moon. The new Jerusalem is light itself, radiant like crystal, as if made from precious stones. It has no temple, either, just as it has no sun, because worship has suffused its every stone. I suspect that Antoni Gaudí wanted us to see something of the “new heaven and new earth” that John prophesied in his basilica—especially the new earth.
In his lifetime, Gaudí witnessed the dehumanizing side effects of industrialization, just as today we feel the dehumanizing pressures of the digital revolution. He responded with a reaffirmation of the natural and the human. Both Ezekiel and John foresaw multitudes thronging to a new temple, and perhaps that is why the crowds in the Sagrada Familia, bathed in the blood-red light of the western sun, with their babble of languages from every continent, do not disturb my moment of prayer in the apse. They—we—are part of the design.
Beneath his own curmudgeonly facade, Gaudí was a man of deep loves, loves for which he was willing to sacrifice. He loved his church and its worship; he loved the Christian doctrine of redemption through suffering; he loved Catalonia, his homeland, its people, its language and its stories; he loved its trees, flowers, snakes, birds, hills and waters; he loved those who labored with him on his great project; and he loved the work itself. Gaudí’s vision is rooted in the incarnation of Jesus, the Word made flesh. One enters the Sagrada Familia through doors telling the story of the Nativity and the Passion; inside one finds a new reality.
The theologian Romano Guardini wrote that liturgy transforms us, but not through a program of moral improvement; instead, it “simply creates an entire world in which the soul can live.” His words seem an apt description of the Sagrada Familia. Inside, when one looks up, one finds oneself not among stars and distant planets, but instead in a forest. It is a forest unlike any other, a forest of sandstone, granite, basalt and porphyry. There is something vaguely skeletal about this forest, but nothing morbid. One is no longer in the darkness of the whale’s belly but within—and part of—a new body, radiant through and through.
Gaudí’s biographer, Gijs Van Hensbergen, calls the Sagrada Familia an “Eden in stone.” Our first parents once lost their way amid the trees of Eden. Gaudí does not see the death-stained world they left behind consumed in a revolutionary blaze, but neither does he accept that world as it is. Instead, he shows us life raised up into a world of new light.
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