It's amazing if you haven't gone, especially when sunlight streams in through the windows.
I saw a quote while I was there that was something along the lines of, "Gaudí is not an artist with whom posthumous collaboration is possible." A couple minutes walking around the church is all that's needed to confirm that notion.
I’m not particularly religious and not Catholic, but the Sagrada Familia brought me to tears. The interior is one of the most beautiful man-made spaces I’ve ever seen.
I hope you have a great trip! If you find yourself with a window of free time, there is a bakery called Pastisseria Hofmann that makes a sweet cream filled croissant that is dangerously good. We got one in ~2018 and have wanted another one since haha
Spent two months in Barcelona over the last year, and I second the recommendation. The mascarpone croissant is excellent, but I would actually recommend the raspberry jam croissant even more highly. I haven’t had a thing from Pastisseria Hofmann that I didn’t like.
Same for me. It took me completely by surprise, but as soon as I stepped inside, I started to cry. I don't like it that much from the outside (though I don't mind it either and appreciate it's unique style in contrast to a lot of people that seem to hate it) but on the inside, it really is amazing. I'd visit Barcelona just for the Sagrada Familia
My wife teared up and I was stunned. We arrived in the morning and the light was pushing the color out of the stain glassed windows! My neck was sore for a few days after looking up at the ceiling so much.
Waiting in line outside was even fun, just looking at all the detail.
I had this exact same experience - it was (and is) hard to explain to other non-religious people who haven't seen it. I'm not even particularly prone to being moved to tears by beauty... one of the few times in my life this happened to me.
> I saw a quote while I was there that was something along the lines of, "Gaudí is not an artist with whom posthumous collaboration is possible." A couple minutes walking around the church is all that's needed to confirm that notion.
Maybe I misunderstand "posthumous collaboration", but the church is literally being built after Gaudi's demise by a bunch of other people, isn't that posthumous collaboration?
Maybe not on the design and original plans? IIRC they're trying to do everything according to original designs, which would not be 'collaboration', just... implementation. It's been over 30 years since I was there though - some friends who went more recently said a lot more has been done since then. Might be fun to go back and look for the differences, but I do not remember much detail, just a sense of 'big'.
The destruction of Gaudi’s studio wasn’t exceptional. The Republican forces destroyed many other religious buildings and works of art throughout Spain before and during the Civil War.
i understood it to mean that the architectural vision of Gaudi was so original and singular that and future work could only be completion of an original design, an imitation of the already completed work, or an obviously seperated style (like inserting a jazz solo in mozart)
in contrast other architects worked within a well defined style with rules and systems that can be worked within by modern architects to "posthumously" collaborate. like how you can use the principles of gothic architecture to add a modern addition to a gothic cathedral. the only principle Gaudi followed was natural inspiration and his own interpretation of that, something nobody could ever define
It's just a nice way of saying it's difficult work because Gaudi was a genius and they can't hope to equal him. It doesn't mean they won't try their best.
Even that isn't true. Lots of original models/drawings have been lost, new designers interpret or reconstruct what they think Gaudi wanted to do, based on incomplete plans or where decisions weren't fully made.
Not to mention new materials are available today that are being used and new processes/workflows which change the results slightly too.
Sagrada Familia isn't a 100% implementation of the original vision, as even the original vision was incomplete when Gaudi died.
Ok, maybe he didn't specify how all the statues, doors, windows and other embellishments should look like, but the basic structure and shape (the three portals and the 18 spires which also determine how the support columns in the interior of the church are placed) is the same as in Gaudí's original plans.
Buzzword bingo isn't restricted to software. The statement just says "Gaudi was a great architect". But it sounds more impressive to talk about "posthumous collaboration", especially if you don't analyze it.
In this case what they are saying is that Gaudi’s design sense is so unique and iconoclastic that it’s essentially impossible to mix it with other styles of design.
> It's amazing if you haven't gone, especially when sunlight streams in through the windows.
I have been to Barcelona 4 times since I was a kid (1998, 2006, 2009, 2014), and every time the Sagrada Familia looked a little more finished, but still far from being completed. It blows my mind that it will finally be completed in 2 years.
I've tried to explain to people what that sunlight through the upper stained windows does to the light in that huge room but failed. It is like the light around you is alive. I think I stood there for five minutes silently just taking it in.
I was there around 20 years ago as well, and I remember it was mostly empty, which added to the feeling of grandeur. But I was there in winter, of course.
Yeah, Barcelona doesn't really have a quiet time from tourists anymore. It's a shame, but I acknowledge that my desire to travel is part of the problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Looking at the surrounding building of the Sagrada, just makes me wonder again, what the hell happened to modern architecture.
Modern architecture has destroyed our cities. It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty, let alone an entire neighborhood. Nothing compared the historic cities of Europe.
In a time when it's cheaper then ever to build, they've not been able to build anything even close to pretty. The best they do is a bad copy of old style.
What happened is that a vast quantity of people moved into and around the cities. We also have more strict building codes that take into account light, air quality, longevity, energy effiency etc.
You’re looking at an old city built for a relatively small elite over many hundreds of years, and you’re surprised why cities built for many millions of people over a few decade look a bit basic in comparison?
I came across some pre-WW2 photographs of a European city I know, of the more poor districts that don’t often get photographed. You think they looked nice? A modern apartment building looks much better than those cheap wooden shacks and lasts 100 times longer.
I think there’s hope in the long term. My grandmas apartment building was built quickly and cheaply and looked like trash when I was a child. It has since been renovated with a nicer brick facade. Could be better, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Give it a hundred years and compounding refurbishment and survivorship bias will
make most cities look great.
One of the only things the Soviets did right was building a shit load of dense, boring housing at huge scales. They eliminated homelessness, which jumped substantially when they became the Russian federation and privitized everything.
Do you speak from experience? Because I was born in the USSR and spent the first five years of my life with my parents in a single room in a communal apartment. "Communal" here means that other families occupied other rooms, one room per family. These families shared the same single kitchen, single bathroom, and single toilet. And the icing on the cake was that these habitats were provided by the state and it was almost impossible to rent anything better, at least not with a standard Soviet salary.
If you are wondering what happened after these five years, we moved to another state-provided habitat, this time separate, for a change. All we had to do was put half a year of effort into finishing it to the acceptable quality — all by ourselves — because you cannot exploit other Soviet citizens. Only the state can do that.
And why exactly five years? Because that was the queue wait time for a new living space once you had a child (me) and exceeded a Soviet norm of square meters per human being. And it was Moscow, the capital, where top money was invested into looking good before the eyes of foreign guests.
Yeah I'm not trying to say it was all peachy or wax poetic about the Soviet Union. It was clearly a deeply flawed country with myriad economic issues. I'm just saying that even if some of the housing was shit, everyone was housed which is commendable.
In the United States, housing is by far the biggest expense for most people, there's a severe shortage of housing, and there's a homelessness problem in most cities. Solving that problem might require a more radical departure from the market based solutions we've been relying on up to this point (and I acknowledge local zoning makes the market less than perfect). Working on the supply side with publicly built housing is something I'd like to see, but the hazard, as you point out, is that it ends up being poorly maintained, overly crowded, and bad.
The failure case in the United States, eg dying of exposure is worse than the failure case was in the Soviet Union, eg being stuck in a really shitty apartment. Another issue is there were probably way more people in that failure case in Russia than there were in the United States. All I'm saying is there's a balance to strike here and public building shouldn't be a tool we ignore.
In Soviet Union everyone worked for the state and the state decided on the wages. Wages, consequently, were shitty, just enough to make ends, and the rest were put where state wanted it to be, mostly into arms race and military budget, then into Party means, and the rest into social projects, including housing.
Think of it as a universal welfare, when there are no market-driven actors to produce better quality goods and services, and everything is just shitty enough to not do harm to consumers.
US homelessness is not caused by shortage of housing. There's tons of cheap housing in US, but people just don't want to live where housing is cheap. California's problems are mostly caused by commie-like government and money they put into non-working social programs. Actually, if they keep doing that for several more decades they may end up in a next level USSR.
"Homelessness jumped substantially" is not "Housing became cheaper and affordable". It was all state owned lol, what does affordability even mean in that context? I'm just saying they built more housing than they needed and housed everyone and that was good. The Soviet economy itself was fucked (20% of gdp on defense spending!), and after the collapse housing did obviously become more expensive (ie, not free).
They were also cheap to build and they built a fuck load of them. Personally I'd prefer it if people could actually afford to live in cities if I had to make the choice between putting up some ugly buildings vs delaying development or not building at all.
Do the two have to be mutually exclusive? Are crappy architecture and plenty of housing or interesting architecture and a housing shortage our only options?
Be careful to avoid survivorship bias here. Only the "best" buildings from Medieval and Renaissance times (or even later into the 1800s) are still around. Many of the buildings we constructed in the second half of the 20th century will be gone in 100 years or so.
Also, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I know there was a lot of criticism when the Louvre built the pyramid, but I quite like the contrast of traditional and modern.
You must not travel a lot. There are huge numbers of historic villages and towns with original or very old architecture. If we were dealing with survivorship bias, we should expect essentially random buildings scattered around cities, not entire towns or contiguous historic districts.
You may want to double check that the historic buildings you see in historic districts are actually, uhh, historic. Historic building codes have been around for hundreds of years in some areas and many of the buildings are rebuilds and ones that didn’t fit the mold have been rebuilt.
Not that modern concrete architecture is not a blight on our cities, but not all historic buildings were originally as charming as we may see them today.
People give Brutalism a lot of shit but I think the buildings have a certain utilitarian charm. I have heard that concrete can be very unsustainable and counterintuitivly actually hard to maintain though, so I suppose it's a good thing it's going out of style.
I was thinking of iconic buildings - cathedrals, etc.
Thinking of old towsn in the UK, many are picturesque, but those old cottages tend to have limited windows and low ceilings make them far less functional by modern standards.
I think the ultimate city if you like old European architecture is probably Prague. It's a big city and most of it is amazing.
You're totally right that France/Italy/Belgium all have amazing towns to visit. But in case someone is looking for a random tip elsewhere: Český Krumlov (https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cesk%C3%BD_Krumlov), which is in today Czechia (handy in case you happen to visit Prague), but used to have a large German population before WWII. It looks wonderful, perhaps the most perfect Medieval town I've seen.
Yeah Prague is awesome; although same as Amsterdam, and other bigger cities the chaos of the cities at times is a distraction. Cesky looks lovely, France also has amazing places. I do think this is the most perfect Medieval town though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont-Saint-Michel
new york city's brownstones are considered beautiful and iconic now, but when they were built they were described as cheap eye-sores and a blight upon the beautiful city.
i imagine a similar trend must exist for most of the European cities. people's aesthetic usually rejects the new, but recognizes the beauty once it is seen as old and classic
The reason they were thought of ugly at the timewas because the brown house houses were relatively monotone, one type of building compared to richer streets where every house was different & build by the vision of the owner. See every house on the Amsterdam on the Canals: https://www.tripsavvy.com/thmb/Mkr3pQQInOjO4a3UJUP2EzBpywU=/...
But stil the brownstone building have way more ornaments, arches & other details intended to make it pretty then any modern flat. I have a real hard time believing we will every think of the grey Paris banlieus as pretty: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/05/15/business/GHETTO-1...
Yes, only the best buildings from hundreds of years ago have been preserved, but that still doesn't explain why we build ugly buildings right now. You would think we would be able to draw on centuries of architectural trial and error to determine what is objectively pleasing to people. Instead it's like the past never existed. Architects keep building hideous blobs of steel and glass and wondering why people don't like their creations.
"hideous blobs of steel and glass" were originally known as glorious and beautiful modern architecture. oversaturation makes the creative into the tired and boring
I am not sure - I can see why Empire State or Chrysler are majestic, but WTC was hideous. And I saw them simultaneously for the first time. The shard is probably nice, shanghai tower is not too ugly, burj khalifa is ok - but almost everything else is eyesore.
Everything about building in the US is either forbidden or mandatory; "liking" doesn't come into it, there generally isn't a choice in the matter.
The main aesthetic reason new buildings don't look like old ones is Baumol's cost disease, i.e. nobody can hire that many laborers anymore. The second is fire codes and accessibility requirements.
Nope, visit ANY old german village that wasn't bombed during ww2.
Most of the old houses still stand and every single one is prettier than what is being build today.
An average pre-WW2 house in a German village may be prettier than an average house from the 1950s, but certainly not than an average house being built today. Your perception is presumably clouded by the touristy "villages", which in fact have been at least locally important towns at some point in the past.
Are you saying medieval Germany was richer than present-day Germany or USA? That's of course not true.
And it's also not clear why you call it a survivorship bias - these villages were probably above-the-median in their days, but it's not some singular building like Pyramids that is not representative of overall building of that era/territory. It was just how the houses were built there and then.
"Survivorship bias" isn't an excuse to build things that look like shit.
If anything, we should be emulating the things that survived because on some level we all collectively thought they were worth keeping.
>Many of the buildings we constructed in the second half of the 20th century will be gone in 100 years or so.
It's actually much less than 100 years - more like 30 - but this is actually the problem, the whole "intentionally build things that don't last" thing.
Regarding the Louvre, I think that pyramid looks like a fractal cancer, growing out of what is an otherwise stunning and breathtaking scene. If it were destroyed somehow (perhaps the anti-oil protestors can train their gaze on something other than actual art), no one would care except those who wish to look sophisticated by cheering "modern" "art".
The thing is, most of the 60's/70's building look like shit from outside but are pretty nice and super funcional from the inside while some older ones were made for an era where people had huge hotel particuliers with servants and stuff and the current appartments have been build by splitting those in parts. Those appartments that aren't as well made/functionnal despite being nice to look at and having lots of vertical space, nice carved/moulded ceiling, etc.
In Spain it's not only 60s/70s, pretty much everything build between the 60s and the 90s is not only ugly AF, but very low quality. And Barcelona is not even the worst offender. In northern spanish cities there's a lot of grey in the buildings, with basically no insulation in a humid and cold climate. My GF used to joke it was colder inside her home than outside.
After the new construction code in the early 00s the quality has improved a lot but we still build very ugly buildings.
No wonder why people chose to gather and spend their time where the historial centers are.
Seems architects really refuse to extract some lessons from this.
Well I hate to say it as I am also living in Spain, in the south, but there is definitely a culture of making stuff with the minimum effort and a lack of focus on quality.
And I too do joke that it feels colder inside than outside from mid november to mid february.
And half the Barcelona buildings from the 60s/70s were made with concrete that turns to sand when it gets wet (aluminosis). People have died in buildings that suddenly collapsed.
I’ve found most of the 60’s and 70’s building in the U.S. to be just the opposite myself. Often stairwells are hidden, sometimes behind multiple doors, so even going up a single flight of stairs usually involves waiting for an elevator. A lot of places seem to use space in a bizarre way - lobbies that are much too large and empty, the functional areas being cramped and small. Ceilings that are much too high, which not only waste space but lead to many functional issues (changing a bulb that’s 16 feet up is much more difficult than changing one that’s 8 feet up). Windows that are pulled back from the wall so they get much less natural lighting.
The whole thing feels like the architectural profession became interested in impressing each other with designs that they thought looked cool, and seemed to forget that people actually had to use these spaces. The areas here with buildings from that area usually feel much more dead than areas with buildings from almost any other era.
I didn't say that. Maybe I haven't phrased it correctly but it was meant to be understood like "despite lots of vertical space, nice ceilings, etc". These are nice things but it doesn't really matter if the floor space is illogical, the kitchen is barely larger than a small wardrobe and you have a piece of corridor that barely has any purpose, is difficult to organize and is only wasting space.
We underestimate the pressure the world has been under in the last century. In 1950, we had about 2.5 billion people. Today, we have 8 billion. We had to find accommodations for 5.5 billion people who all expected to have a greater standard of living with electricity and living space; something had to give.
We had to be more parsimonious with the materials at our disposal.
"We had to find accommodations for 5.5 billion people" is irrelevant to a discussion of one city in Spain that did not grow quickly: Spain has its own architects that haven't been influenced much by architects in countries like Nigeria and India where the population grew very fast.
It’s not irrelevant as a ratio. 2.5 billion to 8 billion is very comparable to 500k to 1.7 million. The population tripled in 70 years and, in the current times, you also have to deal with all the existing architecture and infrastructure in the city that wasn’t built for anywhere near that population level.
People really don't understand how big the 'boomers' generation really was. Populations exploded in the post war era and with the rapid rise in technology people were disinterested in doing things in the way of the past. In the US at least there was a mass migration over the country and a massive need for housing that could be quickly built. Later this rapid expansion of 'sameness' would be captured in popular media in songs like "Little Boxes".
There was also an enormous urban population boom in the heyday of capitalism, late 1800s early 1900s, and architecture was absolutely glorious. It's really not the post war population boom. It was the post war mindset, modernism, a spiteful iconoclasm married to an infatuation with high technology (ie. All human experience must be mediated with the latest technology, a priori). Without that, our cities would have grown just as beautifully as before.
Eh, it was an urban population migration after mechanization of farming. Population growth then still was not great nor anywhere near what happened later. This time was laying the roots of a future time where people didn't stay still and the world was moving at a fast pace, but it wasn't that world yet.
Le Courbousier is what happened. He actually wanted to demolish Paris and put up a huge office park. But I love modern architecture. Try going to the Salk institute or even the Marin County Civic Center. It’s pretty mystical.
We have very different minds ;). I see why you like it, it's interesting in a desert clean kind of way. But it's not a loving livable place.
I have a hard time believing most people will express the same kind of feeling of inspiration they have walking on the old cobblestone streets of for instance France or Italy.
Well, different climates have different building requirements and materials. Plus, a cathedral isn't meant for living in.
I think you'd find that feeling walking the old market streets, covered by cloths to block most of the sun, bees buzzing around the honey vendor, people bustling by. I can't find the perfect picture, but https://i.ytimg.com/vi/M-g876LtXFs/maxresdefault.jpg isn't bad. That one's a little more tourist-focused and lacking in crowds than the exact street I'm remembering.
Brazilia (the city) is pretty nice. Getting rid of roads and keeping/extending parks is much easier there than, in either a suburban sprawl or in Barcelona.
The "towers in the park" concept works, if the park is not just an artificial green desert. (And the towers are not the underfunded "projects"), for example Hong Kong (the island), with the green mountain and the walkable seaside promenades felt much more livable than even Barcelona.
A few things. first off, we have code now. Until the 1950s you could do whatever you wanted. But nowadays there a bunch of things that need to be "up to code" and it's not just internals like electrical, etc. Stairways, railings, heights, room sizes, construction technique, etc are all affected by this. And we continue to add more and more code for things like efficiency, etc. And this isn't a bad thing - code means we have safer buildings and when someone buys a building there's at least a minimum standard that has been met.
So this means you are going to build in ways that are proven and will be up to code. Which leads to the second thing.
Construction materials have become standardized over the last 100 years or so. We went from a world where things were crafted to a world where things are manufactured and installed. Buildings are made mainly of commoditized parts and materials today which makes a lot of things look simplistic and similar. This is good in many ways because when a craftsman was hand carving things they were not very productive and it cost a lot of money. Today, a worker is amazingly productive since their tools are powered and their materials are pre-fabricated and just need to be cut to size.
Lastly, buildings are far more complex today than 100+ years ago. Lots more electrical and plumbing, complex HVAC, insulation requirements, etc. These things were not considered long ago. You had carpentry and maybe a bit of plumbing and some basic electrical.
You can still get really nice custom work done and it's unbelievable expensive.
I'll take the ugly 70s concrete block I work in nowadays any day. It's _extremely_ difficult to adapt a lot of these old forms to functional, comfortable housing and offices. There are exceptions, but practicality is a big part of the change.
You're also seeing a certain amount of survivor bias in many cities; the old buildings that are still around are the ones that someone thought it would be worthwhile to keep around.
We don't have to go that far back in time, European cities have loads of beautiful buildings still from early 1900s. For example whole neighborhoods of Jugendstil apartment buildings that mainly housed working class people moving to cities. New construction in these same neighborhoods simply do not match the beauty of the existing housing stock. And early 1900s housing is usually quite nice if it's been at least slightly renovated (double glazing etc).
The schism was modernism, a mental breakdown in the west after the world wars. What was easy, convenient, efficient from a machine perspective, therefore was wholesome, aspirational, valuable from a human perspective.
Other explanations, survivor bias, population boom, ... are fundamentally wrong because even though they may have ab after the fact rationalization, they were not the instincts that animated this revolution.
One of the major points, afaik, is that these beautiful buildings require a lot more manual work. It used to be that materials were expensive and labor cheap, but that equation reversed, and skilled labor required for such a nice facade now comes with a heavy price.
But I have no expertise in construction nor history so can't say if that's true.
Yes, that's true, but the style also changed so dramatically, not just means of production. e.g. machine production does not have to mean that overall building proportions became so weirdly unattractive as well.
But really, just because it was _cheap_ an _easy_ for a machine, therefore it meant it was _aspirational_, _desirable_ for a human. That is the core shift, it was primarily ideological (and we rationalized this new mindset _after_ it already reified itself).
You are understating cheaper to build. A lot of the beautiful buildings took decades if not centuries to construct. Cost hundreds of millions of dollars inflation-adjusted. They are also extremely expensive to maintain, as stone is expensive in so many ways.
Mass urbanization, raising wages, labour saving construction methods and mass produced materials. I think dutch modern architecture does an alright blending blending constraints and modernism. Sagrada Familia is not a model for mass development. That said, I do love me some blood equity monumentality. It would be "neat" importing 10,000 cheap labourers, train them up on traditional masonery techiques and build some more monuments.
> Looking at the surrounding building of the Sagrada, just makes me wonder again, what the hell happened to modern architecture.
To a certain extent: economics.
Beauty generally does not show up on a spreadsheet, and when it does it often adds cost. Glass costs less than steel, concrete, or stone, so it's lower CapEx to have glass towers. (Of course glass sucks as a thermal insulator, so your OpEx for heating/cooling may be higher.)
Glass is also not heavy, which is very important. (At least, relative to steel and brick.)
The modern glass curtain wall is popular because it is not load bearing and costs very little extra to hold up. High-rise steel frame was very expensive, and high-rise masonry basically impossible, because the frames also had to bear the weight of their own upper floors. The structural part of a modern skyscraper is basically floors cantilevering off a small concrete core, and the glass wall simply hangs off the cantilever.
Check out Brent Hull on YouTube who is answering this very question. His basic premise is that post WWII the focus on efficiency and mass production ruined the craftsmanship that went into older buildings.
I love Brent and his redesigns of existing buildings are really eye opening. It really shows how bad people fail at building traditional buildings today. He makes a compelling argument for why his redesign makes more sense and to my eye the buildings tend to look much better and simpler too. It's based around some basic theory that had served builders well for a long time and has been thrown out to build gaudy things that imitate very poorly.
One of my favorite observations of his is that a modern cheap door isn't even really a door - it's more a simulation of a door than an actual door. It is made of plastic and filled with foam but is made to look like wood and has stiles and rails and fake paneling pressed into the moulding to look like what people think a door looks like. And it comes in a pre-fabricated frame and is installed, not crafted. But it doesn't feel like a door or sound like a door. Just a flimsy thing that closes a passage off. And we admire installers today, not craftsmen.
One thing about him, and I think he acknowledges it, is that efficiency and mass production are why so many more people can live in relatively nice homes today. Not everyone (in fact most people can't) can live in a well crafted home made from the best materials, etc. But I do agree with him that developers could at least try and make things that are rooted in some sense of design principal.
You might enjoy the Tom Wolfe book, From Bauhaus to Our House.
In it he tries to explain the observations you make. Very lively, funny writing and you know he is on the right track because he was universally panned by modern architects.
> It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty, let alone an entire neighborhood.
Hold on, we're talking about Barcelona... The phallus tower (Torre Glòries) certainly has a certain aesthetic ;)
A bit on the more serious side: If you ask city planners, they will probably be able to list thousands of examples of beautiful neighbourhoods in modern cities. They do exist, but I agree that a lot of modern buildings appear quite "soulless" and exchangeable.
"modern architecture" is a following the same pricniples of most architecture, engineer it to be strong enough, for as cheap as possible, if you are very very lucky somebody may be willing to pay extra to make it look good.
usually the church was more than willing to pay extra for beauty, but the average apartment building or urban mixed-use building built in the last few decades is likely focused on being affordable and efficient.
Swaminarayan Akshardham in New Jersey is new and beautiful. Probably noteworthy that it is also a religious building. I think ugly modern buildings are a problem of aesthetics and ambition, not one of finances or possibility. Old buildings on American college campuses are wonderful; new ones are dreadful yet certainly much more expensive, even inflation-adjusted.
old buildings used to also be death traps, we only know of the survivors, but lots of old construction would burn down, collapse in a minor earthquake, or rot from water.
I agree. Kids watch Harry Potter and dream about Hogwarts and their school pretty much looks like a prison without the barbwire and guard towers. They don't play in the woods but on a asphalt blacktop or a square of grass. Sad.
Art Nouveau, Gaudí’s dialect being Modernisme, was a movement which aimed to democratise and modernise architecture and design compared to previous periods.
I remember reading Future Shock when I was quite young and the parts about people changing jobs quite often and living closer to nomads stuck with me, even though I have to say I've forgotten most of the book.
Simply put anything modern is likely to change its purpose many times in the lifetime of the building. A company might have its headquarters in one place for 100 years, but probably not. It may move to a bigger building, be bought and dissolved, or go out of business before the usefulness of the building itself. Having a generic asset is worth more in cases like this.
Same with housing and the 'millennial grey' people point out these days. Most people expect to move many, many times within their lives. I've moved 10 times myself, and I know people that have moved far more than that. A house is rarely looked at like a forever place, and few families seem to keep their houses in the family for multiple generations. Add to this that family size in the US is rapidly shrinking there are a lot of people who know their assets won't be passed on, but sold instead.
The purpose of most buildings is to be useful, not to look pretty in pictures.
> Modern architecture has destroyed our cities. It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty
That's because the things that get preserved are the things that are pretty. You think Romans built their outhouses and warehouses and cheap apartments to look like the colosseum? No, that shit was ugly too, that's why it's not around any more.
This is called "survivorship bias". Don't base your opinions of the past exclusively on the things that survived til now. The things that survived til now are, by definition, the exception to the norm from the time. Not every european building is a work of art, not every Lancaster Bomber avoided being shot in the engines, not all the dinosaurs were animated skeletons.
I know the economics must somehow make sense, but it's still hard to wrap my head around the fact that even with quite literally once-unimaginable computing power, semi-magical modern materials, structural theory, decades of recorded research and testing, international standardisation, leaps in simulations, optimisation, robotics, pneumatics, hydraulics, electronics, networking, transmission, logistics and supply chain engineering, economies of scale that dwarf the imagination of the most ardent technologist of yesteryear....humans still can't stack bricks or nail frames cheaply enough to reliably put roofs over heads.
Short answer to the riddle is: not enough demand to warrant investment (because you would need a long string of a few magnitudes bigger projects). Basically, the same structural problem that plagues nuclear power plant construction.
All those fancy technological advancements did almost nothing to the typical housing construction, it's still a lot of manual work, a lot of specialized tasks (site prep, foundation, frame/structural stuff, roof, insulation, plumbing, sewage, wiring, HVAC, connecting utilities), a ton of waiting, lots of logistics. An enormous amount of babysitting (project management) of the builders, because everything is basically custom/one-off.
There's a lot of costs that go into construction, the actual expense of putting together the parts to make the thing was at one time the biggest one, but not any more.
With all those new technologies that increase the efficiency of buildings and construction come technicians who expect to be paid well for their expertise, so for every manual job removed there's an expert who needs to be paid about as much or more to operate or plan the labor-saving technology so implementing the technology may not actually reduce the cost to the builder at all.
For the parts that do still require manual labor, that's been getting a lot more expensive and hard to find, because hand-in-hand with people specializing in all these fancy new technologies, the appetite for manual labor employment in developed economies has fallen, which pushes up the cost of the parts of construction that technologies hasn't changed.
Regulations and requirements have also massively proliferated in the last century. The number of inspections and approvals that any piece of construction needs is pretty crazy compared to the prewar era, plus new requirements and design limitations set by law that, while good for society (anti-fire, disability access), can sometimes drive up costs or limit design choices because ramps take more space than stairs and fire sprinklers represent a doubling of the amount of plumbing work you need to do.
Land has gotten progressively more expensive as it has become more scarce. Sprawl kinda reached the limit of what commuters are willing to tolerate in the 90s, so nobody can do cheap greenfill development anymore (anecdote, my parents had a new house built on the outskirts of Phoenix in 2006, with a 70 minute minimum driving commute, which I would absofuckinglutely never tolerate for myself): you need to buy more expensive interior land to redevelop. God help you if your local land use regulations require you to provide free parking, in which case you may be forbidden from building on as much as 2/3 of that very expensive land you just bought.
Because the footprint is so expensive, you don't have the cash to invest in quality without making the building too expensive for the people who are going to be using it.
And the footprint isn't the only thing that's more expensive, all the cool new technologies that your grandparent comment brought up are all more expensive to implement than structures without them. The existence of those technologies implies the existence of skilled professionals to plan and install them. It used to be that you just needed to pay your architect and engineer and builders, now you gotta also pay your crane operators and electricians and plumbers and acoustic consultants, and fire protection experts, and geologists, and network engineers, and energy consultants, and accessibility consultants too and they all want to be paid well for their expertise.
The proliferation of skilled professionals reduces the appetite in the population in general for unskilled manual labor, so that gets more scarce and expensive too. Gotta pay the builders well or else they'll quit and change careers to be one of those professional types.
Add to that the regulatory and compliance requirements that raises the floor of acceptable quality (building MUST be energy efficient, accessible, fire-safe, earthquake-safe, minimally ecologically impactful, etc etc etc) and your wiggle room for where to focus your "quality" budget is pretty tiny and exterior aesthetics rapidly sinks to the bottom of that list.
[disclaimer: I actually disagree with the people who say that new buildings are ugly. I actually like the modernist and international style aesthetics that are artistic declarations of raw functionality. My town has a brutalist city hall where the council chamber juts out in an overhang, so when you walk by you can look at it and say "that funky structural appendix is the exact room where people are making important decisions at this very moment" which I think is cool. This post-modern concert hall just opened a few blocks from me and I think it's pretty sexy: https://wysomusic.org/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2021-11... ]
bricks and wood are unable to maximize the quality of a limited footprint. an expensive plot of land in a city needs to be built to certain quality standards to make sure it is affordable and safe. this is only possible with steel and concrete.
brick and wood alone can't build safely and cheaply over 3 stories
Of course depending on the definition, but light-framed wood is good for around 5 stories. And mass timber (eg. CLT - cross-laminated timber) is good up to ~20. And for the foundation concrete is still needed. But a lighter one.
Can we? Construction is heavily impacted by cost disease.
My friend recently had a house built and the plot of land was around 15% of the cost of the entire project. The land in more premium location would still end up under 30% of total cost.
You're right, but there's a lot of people here making excuses predicated on treating entirely socially-voluntary problems (like providing no public transport, or allowing regulatory capture to inflate costs) as laws of nature.
>That's because the things that get preserved are the things that are pretty. You think Romans built their outhouses and warehouses and cheap apartments to look like the colosseum? No, that shit was ugly too, that's why it's not around any more. This is called "survivorship bias".
The interior of the small apartments in Pompeii are beautifully decorated, and at the very least more skillfully so than most medieval churches, and we are talking about a small run of the mill rural Italian town.
The reason Roman architecture is gone, is that the christians scrapped them for building materials to build churches, something that still happened until relatively recently (see the Temple of Ceasar pillaged in the late 15th century).
The Colosseum itself is a pretty bad example of architecture left intact, it's literally sawn-off in half.
> The purpose of most buildings is to be useful, not to look pretty in pictures.
Architecture is the only art where you're forced to participate. So we could pretty much say the opposite, buildings should, among other things, contribute to make a place nice. Or at least not make it more miserable.
> What do you think Barcelona is?
Most of Spanish cities are built with crap buildings dating above the 60s. Just concrete blocks, in some cities even with just plain grey and humidity stains. It doesn't matter how historic the city is, because the "historic center" it's just a small spot surrounded by uglyness.
> > Nothing compared the historic cities of Europe.
>What do you think Barcelona is?
Not historic. Well some of it is, there is a tiny small town core that dates back to Roman times. The vast majority of the city only dates back to the 1900s. They were just lucky that Gaudi and other great architects practiced then and built landmarks that really should be preserved for as long as we can. Don't make a mistake though, Gaudi and peers built the city we know in the 1900s which isn't very old.
McMansions are also functional. They may not look good, but they do what people need in a house well (obviously with thousands of different McMansions there will be thousands of different things). I have a house in 1970 - it is okay, but modern houses of a similar size are a lot more functional because space is used differently. I've been in houses built in 1920 which were really bad - they looked nice but as an engineer I see a lot of things that are just wrong.
"Spanish Civil War: In 1936, during the civil unrest, anarchists broke into the cathedral and stole the plans, and destroyed the church's crypt. Work only resumed after the unrest ended in 1939. The informational remains were pieced together to make Sagrada Familia what it is today."
Where are you getting the "anarchists" part from? As far as I know, it isn't known exactly what group was behind the ransacking, and the sources you link only talks about "Vandals" and "revolutionary groups".
That quote of yours don't seem to be a verbatim quote?
But anarchists were a distinct and active political force in Spain during (and before) the Spanish Civil War. I suspect the page is talking about those anarchists. The Catholic Church was on Franco's side during the Civil War so a church wouldn't have been an unreasonable target for left-wing anarchists, though I have no idea if the claim is true.
I don't know how true to history the movie is, but if close, then "La Lengua de las mariposas" is a good example of basically anyone possibly being accused of being an anarchist at that time, if they were againt the Franco regime.
> The article mistakenly refers to Sagrada Familia as the cathedral of Barcelona. It's not. It's a minor basilica, not a cathedral.
There may not be enough institutional knowledge at CNN about Catholicism that the editors would know that there is a difference between a basilica and a cathedral.
This is the sort of thing that the folks at GetReligion.com were trying to address: not advocating any particular religion, but helping newsrooms ‘get’ religion, in the senses of understanding it and of not getting things wrong. The example at https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2023/12/29/why-we-di... is a really good one: the New York Times in 2014 published ‘the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus is buried.’ There was no-one on the editorial team that handled that article who knew enough about Christianity to know that Christians don’t believe Jesus is buried anywhere.
There is this odd split in American society that makes this possible. You can go through your entire life, end up a professional journalist at the Times and not actually have asked someone about their sincerely held faith and practice. Kids rarely talked about religion in HS, outside of like the Interfaith club. (I ran my high school's and we had an annual panel of a rep from each major religion. I was was quite popular.)
Colleges, especially large ones, do have tons of students of different faiths, but I felt contacts were still minimal. My randomly-assigned freshman year room-mate was a devout Christian and would sing in worship - super wonderful guy. But after that, not much. It's so easy to just hang out with people similar to you - at all stages of life.
Even when you meet someone of a certain faith, you're likely to experience that interaction through holiday, festival, food, dress and so on - think asking a Muslim about Ramadan or being invited to a Hanukah party - but you're not likely to ask doctrinal or theological questions.
Well, the other thing is that many, perhaps most, religious people don't know very much about their religion. Very few Catholics would know the difference between a cathedral and a minor basilica, say (which is what started this thread off in the first place). Actually, I'd argue that this isn't a religious question, anyway; it's administrivia.
This is correct. Catholics pretty much gave up on talking about the faith to anyone, whether to the general public or even their own children during the 1960s.
And it’s not only administrivia, for example only half of US Catholics have heard about transubstantiation and only a third believe in it. [1]
> only half of US Catholics have heard about transubstantiation and only a third believe in it.
The USCCB is trying to work on this, we're almost 2 years into a 3-year Eucharistic "revival" (that word has weird connotations for me, but it's the word they used), https://www.eucharisticrevival.org/
Is that true? I wouldn't know what a minor basilica is per se but I definitely know what a cathedral is. I'm orthodox but I think nearly all lay orthodox christians can name their own bishop and the cathedral of his seat, the definition of cathedral being kind of implicit in that administrative awareness. Maybe it's different for catholics? I'll ask some, I am curious now.
Yeah I'm ready to concede this, mostly based on a poll I just saw showing half of canadian catholics not knowing what transubstantiation is.
But still I think these are bad examples. If asked before this thread I would have said sagrada familia is a cathedral. But that's out of ignorance about that building, not about what a cathedral is. The dublin confusion looks similar to me: those people may know well what a cathedral is and just thought the pro-cathedral was one.
Nah, some event, I assume. It's a big church in the city centre, and I'd assume it has virtually no parishioners these days, so wouldn't surprise me if they use it for other stuff.
The Orthodox Church wasn’t nearly as affected by modernism as Catholicism was.
You can see it directly in church architecture. Compare Catholic Church interiors from the early 20th century and ones now. Now do the same comparison for Orthodox ones. It’s clear that the former desperately don’t want to be Catholic anymore.
The seminarians have shifted very far ideologically away from the cohort who moved the altars, ripped out communion rails, and stripped the ornamentation. That's pretty much consistent with the cohort of Catholics who attend mass weekly (a bare minimum requirement).
Those rails, altars, and decorations are being renovated back into place in some places.
That's true for nearly all folks who would tell you they're part of a certain faith. As in any time, only a few minority ever seem to want to contemplate creation, the nature of god, the particular logics behind faith, etc etc. That's not all bad - people come in a million types.
For most, faith and culture are intertwined as they go about their day. You fast because of course you do, not because you know the thousand-year history of that practice and the relevant scriptural phrases.
I have the opposite impression. Among Westerners Americans seem like the group where Christianity still plays the largest role in the average person's life. They talk about it a lot, to the point that I find it annoying. It's not just people who believe in it, the atheists and secular ones among them constantly complain about how bad religion is and how much they hate it. That's something you simply don't see in Western Europe, it's a topic that doesn't really come up much because most younger people don't care. They never go to church, they aren't involved with religious folks, they simply don't think about it at much.
The only other country I can think of that comes close would be Poland, if that counts as Western.
You misunderstand how Americans talk about religion. A lot of us are religious and we talk about it - but we are careful to stay in generic terms because historically - back in the old country (Europe) we would be encouraged to shoot/kill someone of a different religion. America tended to put a lot of different religions together and so very religious people had to figure out how to get along with someone strong in a different religion to get things like a mayor elected.
Of course today few in Europe would go to war over religious differences. The world has changed (for the better unless by odd chance you happen to be the same religion as me - note I do not state which religion that is - this omission makes this a statement you can agree with whereas if I stated the religion you would disagree)
Yes, America is one of the most Christian of the major Western countries. However, the geography of faith is quite varied. We run around in cars, jetting to exactly the institutions we want to patronize. So it's possible to easily stay only in your own community.
I spent most of the first 30 years of my life surrounded by and friends with one flavor of deeply religious Christian or another (if my high school had had an 'interfaith' club, the faiths would have been 'Baptist' or 'Dutch Reform'), including Catholics. I say that to point out that the only reason I know there's something special about 'cathedrals' as opposed to other churches is because I read a bit of trivia once about what counts as an English city.
> I say that to point out that the only reason I know there's something special about 'cathedrals' as opposed to other churches is because I read a bit of trivia once about what counts as an English city.
If that trivia was that a cathedral is required to make a city, or that the presence of a cathedral makes a place a city, then that is _wrong_, though commonly believed. It was the case during the 16th century, kind of (Henry VIII did it) but it became far messier after that; by the 19th century non-cities with cathedrals and cities without cathedrals both existed.
The legal regime just prevents the state from going too far in promoting one faith. But whether you encounter someone with a different belief system depends on geography, modes of transport, openness to other beliefs, etc. There's a lot more to it! I'm thinking of it as a stochastic process.
> There may not be enough institutional knowledge at CNN about Catholicism that the editors would know that there is a difference between a basilica and a cathedral.
I find it shocking that writers there have heard different words for "big impressive Catholic church" but lack the intellectual curiosity to learn the difference. Words are what they deal in all day.
I sincerely doubt that the New York Times as an institution is unaware of the fact that resurrection is a core tenet of Christianity. The BrietBlart-class right wing news media loves to make a big deal out of a hardly noticeable editorial mistake like the incorrect tense in an unimportant double-appositive clause.
Getting the difference between a Cathedral and a Basilica wrong is also not an example of "news media being anti-religion" because most religious people, including probably most American catholics, hardly know the difference since it's a piece of nomenclature that only matters if for some reason you've been charged with buying the right ceremonial hat for the guy in the back office.
Obviously they should correct it, because it's journalism's job to educate people, but I would stay far away from claiming it's any kind of institutional hostility to religion to make a typographical error or repeat a common misconception. Newspapers make these kinds of minor errors about all topics all the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/reader-center/corrections...
This was one of the foundational points of Gnosticism in early Christianity. It's worth noting that this position is considered heresy by most of the major established branches of Christian tradition.
You can very substantially discount measures of the importance of Christianity in most countries, then, as by that measure the number of Christians is massively overreported in censuses etc. and it's a dying religion.
However fact still remains that a huge number of people who consider themselves Christian do not believe in the resurrection, and that in itself makes it entirely reasonable to word things that way whether you agree that those people are Christian or not.
This is just bad journalism. The subject doesn't matter; you'd expect news reporters to put some effort into fact checking and generally telling the truth.
Organizational hierarchy of the Catholic Church: a building is a cathedral if and only if it is the seat of a bishop, no matter how grand or modest the building is. There can not be more than one cathedral in a diocese.
But colloquially, Sagrada Familia is what most people would consider a cathedral.
Well there's a lot of people with the family name King, but you know, they still have to play (and win!) the fancy hat game to be actually granted royal rights.
In that case it is different because it is/was a building used by the french church. Not some random one named like this by someone with no relation to the church.
A cathedral is the official seat of the local the bishop and the Sagrada Familia isn't one.
A basilica on the other hand is an honorific title granted to some churches by the pope for historical/religious reasons.
An interesting note: Saint Peter in Rome, the most famous church in the christian world is not a cathedral itself as it is not where the pope has its seat, that's actually another basilica in Rome, Saint John Lateran, which makes it the most important church in the catholic hierarchy with the title of "Omnium Urbis et Orbis Ecclesiarum Mater et Caput", or "Mother and leader of all the churches in the world".
The Dedication of the Basilica of St John Lateran is one of the observances in the Catholic liturgical calendar with its own special mass readings that supplant the normally scheduled readings for the day (most of the liturgical calendar consists of dates relative to the start of Advent which happens on the fourth Sunday before Christmas). If I remember correctly, this is one of the feasts considered important enough to supplant the normal Sunday readings if it happens on a Sunday. (Also, worth noting that it’s one of the feasts celebrated in both the Latin and Eastern churches.)
The other interesting thing about that is the cathedral seat of the Pope is outside the Vatican City - so it is in his religious territory as Bishop of Rome but not in his secular state.
It belongs to the Holy See, but it's outside of Vatican City. It's kind of like how Guernsey is owned by the British Crown, but it's not part of Britain.
I'm not 100% of all legalese technicalities but I know for a fact vatican law applies there and it's managed and guarded by vatican's gendarmerie (my ex went to the university behind the basilica which is also part of the Holy See).
They are like foreign embassies, part of Italy but under ownership of Holy See. The Holy See is different than Vatican City. The Vatican City is independent country governed by the Holy See, the head of the Catholic Church.
It's been not in Rome only since Vatican City came into existence in 1929. It's been in Rome every single year before then.
Saint John Lateran is also not in Italy [1] due to an extraterritoriality treaty in 1929, part of the same treaty that established Vatican City. By the way, that church is exactly 1700 years old this year.
In short, the "major" is reserved for four top churches in Rome. "Minor" is used to signal that the church is of significant importance, but not as important as the major ones. It's not related to the size at all :)
I literally couldn't care less, but I'll wade into the depths of pedantry with you. It did not refer to the "cathedral of Barcelona", it just called it "the cathedral". Cathedral has an official meaning in Catholicism, but the colloquial use of cathedral in the US means "large fancy church building" and not "Capitol of a Catholic jurisdiction”.
Pitt didn't call their big building the Cathedral of Learning because their equivalent of a bishop in their organizational hierarchy sits there.
I feel like the only person in the world who was thoroughly underwhelmed by it and really don’t see how its future space requirements for a staircase can be justified.
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.
George Orwell called it "one of the most hideous buildings in the world." (I don't agree, but I see his point -- it's certainly one of the most eccentric, and it's huge.)
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.
You're not the only one. Although the lighting inside may be beautiful, it is to me, from the outside, fuglier than fugly. Totally and utterly grotesque. I'd be tempted to say a wart in the city but then Barcelona and its superblock is not a beautiful city: it's got nothing on, say, Paris or Rome. So that wart is on par with the rest of the city.
FWIW I find everything made by Gaudi to be completely grotesque.
I don't care about the groupthink: to each its own bad tastes.
I had the same type of feeling. Sagrada felt more like a zoo / tourist attraction then an actual religious building. The design is impressive but it didn't bring the uumpf that Duomo did.
Because it's so crowded, I guess. It's a nice place, especially the exterior and the workshops. The interior feels too bland.
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.
I liked other cathedrals better, too, but I got a lot out of it by contrasting the medieval versions with this. I mean, you got a lot of the same motivations, just with different art styles and materials. Reflecting on that, it made me change the way I view older churches.
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.
I wasn't underwhelmed per se (the thing is mind-bogglingly huge).
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.
> I like to briskly walk around for miles and miles and just see how the city is laid out
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.
I do not like this building, I don't care for it aesthetically, but more significantly it's too new to be culturally importantly. Old churches/mosques/temples can have historical significance, but such is completely missing in this case. There's a joke going around that it's the first cathedral constructed as a tourist attraction which is both hilarious and accurate.
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. The crowds and tourist atmosphere certainly don't help, but even disregarding them I wasn't impressed with what I saw.
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.
I didn't know about it before visiting it, and when I was there, I was surprised to realise that they have charged me admission into a construction zone.
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.
I’ve only seen it in pictures, but I’m not a fan either. Looks completely secular, might as well be a concert hall or something. Maybe that’s the point, throw an as wide net as possible to appeal to everyone to try to justify the cost.
Secular? I mean, it's not conventional 19th century cathedral design, certainly, but it has more religious symbolism than you can shake a stick at.
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.
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.
I can’t see it in the interior shots. It’s possible that it’s all there but drowned out by bad HDR photography, so I will have to take a look for myself.
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.
It simply lacks Catholic design elements. The stained glass is a jumble of nonsense, not even a nice pattern like the Muslims do, and I suppose there is an altar and a crucifix in there somewhere, but they drown in all the visual clutter, like they’re ashamed of it.
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.
The whole church is completely covered in innumerable fractals of catholic symbolism and its main tower will be topped by a 29 meters high cross. Maybe you just don't like the style, which is understandable as it is quite divisive.
There's a rhyme and reason to the stained glass that's tied into the other symbolic elements embedded in the architecture. For example, the color scheme shifts as you pan from the nativity side through to the passion side. The lower panels are not totally abstract; there are vague shapes that sort of remind you of figures, flames, etc. but then it tends to pivot towards full geometric abstraction as you raise your head.
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.
There are a number of material and technology advances [1] that accelerated the pace of the Sagrada Familia's construction — the techniques used to construct the basilica have evolved significantly since construction began.
On a perfect afternoon in September, I walked alone through the park to find the church.
One moment, only trees. The next, La Sagrada Familia.
To stand there, before the century of brilliance and determination that combined to create this mass of stone and glass, on the edge between nature and society, and see, and sense that I too am seen, was one of the great privileges of my life.
To Gaudí, and his countless collaborators…thank you.
It won't. Gaudí's plan was to build a big staircase in front of it creating a new public square next to the temple, replacing some apartment buildings currently being used. Gaudí's project won't be finished until then.
There's some pushback from the neighbors because finishing it all means bulldozing hundreds of apartments, although those apartments were bought at a discounted price decades ago because everyone knew they had an expiration date. And now that it's here, they want to keep their apartments even though they were told about the Sagrada Família from the start.
PS: Gaudí's name is Antoni, in Catalan. Not Antonio. He was a proud Catalan, he was arrested for talking in Catalan.
It is incredibly rare for a large cathedral to be completed just like the original architect envisioned it, without any compromises made along the way*. It may even be said that a large cathedral is never finished - all the large cathedrals have a standing team of builders, usually with a tradition going back to the middle ages, and require constant maintenance work. "Finished" is thus a difficult term for such a building. But if major construction will stop in 2026, with the building no longer having any obvious large missing parts, I am totally fine with calling it "finished", even if the original plans were different. My understanding is that they already deviated from the original plans decades ago.
* I think Cologne cathedral was completed more or less according to the original plan, but only because historism was en vogue and they found the original medieval plans by chance in the 19th century. Strasbourg cathedral is a good example for a cathedral which doesn't look at all like the original architect envisioned it, with a long history of re-planning and some aesthetically botched construction works.
> My understanding is that they already deviated from the original plans decades ago.
Yes, a lot of models and plans Gaudi created for Sagrada Familia were incomplete when he died. It didn't help either that his studio(s) were ransacked during the civil war, so even if he had a 100% vision, the war would ensure those plans didn't survive.
Quite understandable as well. The thing is big enough as it is. Bought at a discount or not, bulldozing that many homes in an overpopulated city that already struggles for space due to its geography is a little ludicrous.
As someone from Barcelona, I really wanna see it finished completely. Those apartments had an expiration date the moment they were built in the 60s. Everyone who bought them at a discount knew that they were going to be torn down when the temple itself was finished.
I feel it's like those people that buy a house near an airport, they pay pennies for it, and then start lobbying the government for a change in air traffic routes.
Exactly. Nimbyism at its finest: all gains are mine; all losses should be covered.
It's bizarre that at the same time, real estate investors think all value increases are rightfully theirs, but they should be protected from any decrease in value.
You can hardly call it 'investing' if you're protected from the downsides.
I don't oppose destruction of housing because of people losing their investment - expropriate it for all I care. But reducing the housing supply is bad for everyone. That's the important problem with nimbyism: it's not that it demands unfair advantages for homeowners as investors, it's that it prevents development that is needed for a better world.
There's definitely an argument to be made that globally iconic feats of architecture have intrinsic value that's more important than a bit of housing. But you do need to account for the social impact of aggravating housing scarcity to make that argument.
We need to build more housing, but that doesn't mean we need to keep existing housing. Most old buildings should be replaced - they were not built with modern codes in mind and so are expensive to heat, dangerous in fire, have not accessible bathrooms, or other such things wrong that are difficult to correct.
> bulldozing that many homes in an overpopulated city
As far as I understand, only one building (many flats though) would have to be removed in order to fit the staircase.
Problem is that there isn't a lot of space available to put the people whose home you just removed, so seems unlikely to happen unless our local government suddenly solves some really hard problems.
We build and build depressing neighborhoods in cities for us to all flee to historical centres to experience beauty for a minute.
I mean if you are in the US you are lost anyway, but the Europe has some beautiful cities (Amsterdam, Venice, Palma, Rome, Vienna the list continues), but none of them are modern.
The citizens should be helped to find replacement, but please let's put some beauty back in our cities and give prominence to Gaudi's architecture (although maybe it's not the prettiest it's at least fun)
Yeah modern in the historic classification of the term, not in the way of speaking. Most people normally consider modern housing last decades. Lots of building up untill the second world ware are gorgous, but not considered modern by most people.
For instance Berlage in Amsterdam is modern in your classifcation. And his buildings grace Amsterdam, but most people would consider them "older", he was living around the same time of Gaudi.
>Lots of building up untill the second world ware are gorgous
I think you may have severely underestimated the population growth and need for housing after WWII. The world had not seen population growth like that before. The US and Europe cast away their ornate designs and focused on a burgeoning population in the US and rebuilding quickly in Europe.
I'm mostly stating an observation. But even so, that excuse would not hold up for the last decades. Architects still keep going to produce hideous things; and not at all being introspective about it.
Probably has to do with utilitarian and post-modernism; and a general deconstructionism of beauty; which is nice as a philosophy but just not inline with the general experience of a human. On top of that, architectural ego's make it worse.
Let alone Canada & Northern US, they combine it with a terrible city planning strategy, moving most utitilities such as shopping, entertainment & parcs, to a mall only reachable with car. Calgary must the most depressive unlivable city I've ever visited.
It was modern at the time, same as Art Nouveau and Art Deco, but then those were (unfortunately) pushed aside by Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and post-WW2 concrete brutalist architecture.
I mean, it lacks most of the defining characteristics of modern architecture. It is highly ornate, for one. I would not put it in the category of modern, aside from describing the time period which it came to be. Art noveau seems more appropriate a description.
> I mean if you are in the US you are lost anyway, but the Europe has some beautiful cities, but none of them are modern.
stop treating us like some kind of zoo animals. The reason why the old tenaments were demolished is because their living conditions brought fire, disease, and discomfort with them.
I mean, most of them are hosting "locals" as in residents who live in Barcelona. I just took a look now and there are at least 90 apartments available on Idealista for rent in just the ~3 surrounding blocks around Sagrada Familia.
So while in general the whole "touristic flat rentals" stuff is clearly hurting the city, maybe over-dramatizing the impact isn't super useful. Overall the situation sucks though, as prices seems to still go up :/
That's a whole other thread. The new Rent Control law has hurt (a lot) long-term rental for locals and long-term residents. All offers on Idealista and other portals are for contracts of up to 12 months, short term rentals under Spanish Law. Those are not rent-controlled contracts.
In my part of Eixample there aren't any long term units available.
Ignore what it says in the listings, even if they say "maximum 11 months contract", once you speak with them and indicate you know the situation and regulations, they'll be open to sign proper contracts, unless the owner is a huge asshole (which, many are, sadly). And yes, this works even in Eixample.
> There's some pushback from the neighbors because finishing it all means bulldozing hundreds of apartments, although those apartments were bought at a discounted price decades ago because everyone knew they had an expiration date. And now that it's here, they want to keep their apartments even though they were told about the Sagrada Família from the start.
Well, I would say this point becomes moot if they didn't have a permit for it from a start.
Also there are laws that are likely to supersede any expiration date that was set by who knows who in a different era.
I read that and saw a lot of other articles about this controversial stairway, but I haven’t been able to find any actually plans or renderings about what it would look like, particularly in context to the existing neighborhood. Do you know of any?
That's a funny inversion of the usual NIMBY logic, where some space is set aside to build apartments but then kids start to play on it or whatever, and then there's no way apartments can be built there.
I assume in this case they're defining finished as within the realms of the possible; kind of seems improbable that the staircase thing will ever happen?
I saw it in 1999, it was not very finished, but already an impressive sight. We tried to climb the tower, but it was very busy that day (probaby like any other day).
We did visit Park Guell, though, on that same day, which was less crowded, and that was incredible.
If you haven't been to Barcelona, it is an amazingly beautiful city. We only spent one day there, which is far too little to do the city justice.
I've been and to me it looked more weird than beautiful. Like something from the set of Farscape. The quasi-organic forms are almost disturbing. I was surprised the clergy of the time agreed to it.
Impressive sure, but in the way of "Wow, there is a lot of work in this weird thing"
Gaudí was incredibly ahead of his time with the design of the cathedral. Even as a non-believer I highly recommend that people visit this building at least once in their lifetime. It's unbelievable in person and I actually got vertigo looking up into it. It's a truly awe inspiring building and it's shocking that it was designed in the 19th century.
While still a marvel in its own right, I couldn't help but feel underwhelmed when I visited.
After witnessing the architecture of both ancient and (relatively) modern Eastern/Southeastern structures, I found the Sagrada Familia lacking. It came across somewhat soulless with its bleached cavernous interior and uninspired stained glass artwork.
That came across harsher than I truly feel, but I think it's garnered some undeserved hype especially after 100 years of construction. I wonder what structures inspired Gaudi that may be lost to time, and what feelings he wanted to evoke in me that I didn't experience during my visit.
One of the most beautiful examples of religious architecture I have ever seen in person. Definitely can get lost in the thousands of little details. Really puts me to shame calling myself an engineer when I other engineers accomplish things of that scale.
If you visit, be sure to checkout the museum in the basement, specially the exhibit about how they calculated the forces on all those columns pre CAD and Finite Element Analysis.
It feels like this is one of the last generation spanning projects left. I have doubts that our immediate gratification society can still envision and execute on projects of this scale.
The reputable press for some reason spread fake news about the fact that the Sagrada Familia is supposed to be finally completed by 2026.
This is complete nonsense, I can't understand how it happened. Apparently, one person stepped in and everyone else happily picked up on it.
In fact, by 2026 it is planned to complete only the central bell tower, the Jesus Tower, which will make the temple the tallest in the world, and the corner Chapel of the Ascension. After that, there will remain such a "small, insignificant detail" as the construction of the central facade of the basilica. It is planned to work on it until 2034 (if everything goes according to plan, the builders cunningly add in this place).
And, only then will the discussion be started about the construction of the stair bridge leading to the entrance, which requires demolishing a block of living buildings on Mallorca Street, imagine the friction at this point..
So, no, it's not going to be finished in 2026. But that doesn't make it a penny less marvelous, one wouldn't even notice it's not finished.
I have always said that most cathedrals, basilicas, etc leave me in awe of the catholic church's wealth and power, but do little to draw me closer to God. Sagrada Familia left me speechless. The way Gaudi works nature and light made me feel close to God in a way that I had never experienced before.
Terrible, people should be able to express their point of view without being downvoted IMO. There is a lot of weight in OP's post and should not be dismissed because people don't agree.
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I saw a quote while I was there that was something along the lines of, "Gaudí is not an artist with whom posthumous collaboration is possible." A couple minutes walking around the church is all that's needed to confirm that notion.