While the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, devotes an exhibition to the Catalan architect, an exciting documentary puts the secrets of the technical prowess on its edification.
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Emblematic Basilica of Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia enters its 140 e year of construction. Even if it is not a record (the York Cathedral, Overseas, has been built in more than two and a half centuries), the duration impresses as much as the building. Vertical accumulation of britched columns of cranes, the outside does not suggest the inner brightness of its successive naves, nor the fine rainbow column forest, nor the modernity of its floral decors.
This makes more than a century that generations of visitors, historians and professionals are wondering about the structure of the building, at the limit of the rules of architecture and good taste, erected by Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) – who resumed, in 1883, the project imagined, then abandoned, by Francisco de Paula del Villar Y Lozano (1828-1901). While opened on April 12 in Paris, the exhibition that the Orsay Museum dedicates to the Catalan artist until July 17, Director Marc Jampolsky brings some answers.
Because this time it’s promised: Sagrada Familia is almost over. Not as planned in 2026, the year of the centenary of the death of his creator – the confines that resulted in delays – but “soon”. On December 8, 2021, the 9th round (out of 18), called the Virgin Mary, was inaugurated. The laying of his glass star at twelve branches opens the film, designed with the image of the symbolic structure: centered on what Gaudi called “the temple”, but allowing various developments, before returning about it central.
Common vision
Societal development, on the common vision that united the industrial Eusebi Güell (1846-1918) and Antoni Gaudí, and on the achievements it has inspired them, such as Colonia Güell, the Güell Palace and Güell Park. Mineral development, during a pleasant walk in the inspiring site of the Monastery and Natural Park of Montserrat, 50 km from Barcelona. Historic developments also, with, in particular, the evocation of the 1909 revolt, which will definitely convince the Gaudi Pious that Sagrada Familia must be the expiatory temple of a violent Barcelona.
To give flesh to his reflections, fiction scenes in subtitled VOs were turned into the modeled decor of the gaudí workshop, which burned in 1936. It is here reconstructed in 3D according to a photogrammetry process. He also detailed at a sequence. The most exciting remains, however, purely architectural with the explanation, using models and albums published from 1917, of the principle of the columns inclined in the force axis, arranged in catenary arcs and rendered self-supporting.
The force is with Gaudi. But not always with his successors, who will gain fifteen years on this nave which culminates at 65 meters without exterior buttresses, before formalizing the three principles used: the hyperbolaoid revolution of a sheet, the hyperbolic paraboloid and the triangular plane. Archi students will appreciate. Passionate successors, such as the Japanese sculptor Etsuro Sotoo, employed since 1978 to realize three doors and six statues, and who converted to Catholicism to immerse themselves on its subject and finish, in 2015, the facade of the Nativity.
Next step, the six central rounds in the completion phase, and whose funding is largely provided by tickets of the 5 million annual visitors (before the CVIV-19 crisis). And, insidiously, interferes with a weekend in the Catalan capital …