Unfinished Business
Barcelona's Sagrada familia has been a work in progress ... for 124
years.
Before
Salvador Dalí, there was Antoni Gaudí.
Spaniards both, they each were dedicated to the expression of
imagination through art, the surreal marriage of reality and
fantasy. And yet it is Gaudí, a before-his-time genius architect
and engineer, whose work goes on to this very day - literally - in
Barcelona.
Gaudí's unfinished masterpiece is the Sagrada Familia, a church
that has been worked on in three consecutive centuries. Today it is
only half complete, and it may take another 30 to 50 years to
finish Gaudí's vision of a massive monument to God that would hold
10,000 to 14,000 worshippers and include a nave designed with
treelike columns and 18 highly original towers topped with
intricate sculptures of Christian symbols.
More than a million and a half people visit the Sagrada Familia
every year. What they see is nothing less than magnificent.
I CHECK INTO my
Barcelona hotel, open the window, and there
is the Sagrada Familia, with its unique towers, ghostlike
draping-over spires, and construction cranes hundreds of feet
high. No question: It dominates Barcelona's cityscape and psyche.
My entry ticket says in six languages, "The fee is a contribution
for the construction," reminding me that I (like Dalí) am a patron
of this ongoing project, which was begun at a time when there were
no radios, televisions, paved roads, or computers. Gaudí wanted
the Sagrada Familia, which means "the Sacred Holy Family," to be
for the family of all humanity. It was originally started in 1882
as an expiatory church to make up for previous anticlerical
movements in
Spain, but after Gaudí was brought in a year later,
the project evolved into something much bigger in vision and in
size.