March 11. Sagrada Familia: Visionary Architect, Antonio Gaudí and Oriol Carrasco

By James Scoville

                  You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

                                                                                          -Genesis 3:19

This is what God said to Adam as he cast him out of Eden, alluding to how He had made humans from the dirt of the ground and that in death they will decompose back into the soil.  I couldn’t help but think of this verse looking up at Antonio Gaudí’s sandcastle-like magnum opus, Sagrada Familia.  The figures of the story of Jesus’ life emerged from the sandstone basilica as if they were animating of their own accord from a sandy beach, only to be imminently washed away by the rising tide.  The life-like figures included all the usual suspects: the shepherds, the magi, an angel band (one playing a bassoon), roman soldiers, and Apostles.  Present above all were the namesake figures of the basilica, the Holy Family: the world’s most famous stepdad, Joseph; Jesus himself, the star of the show; and Gaudí’s personal favorite, Jesus’ mother Mary, who is particularly (and in my opinion, properly) revered here.   Though my personal favorites were the chameleons and turtles.

When I mentioned how the dust verse came to mind to Oriol Carrasco, one of the many current architects working on Sagrada Familia today and our expert on the scene, he said, “Hmmm, that’s one way of looking at it.”  It was the perfect response to a building so full of mystery.

If the outside is, as has been described, “the Bible in stone”, the inside is Gaudí’s paean to nature and where you see first-hand his genius as an architect.  The canopy of the interior’s ceiling floats an almost impossible-seeming distance above the sanctuary’s floor.  We were truly in the midst of a forest of stone and light.  The almost unadorned interior lay in stark contrast to the ultra-adorned exterior.  (About the outside, one of my classmates said, “You know how Coco Chanel said, ‘Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.’  Gaudí put everything on.”)

But Gaudí wasn’t just inspired by nature visually, but structurally as well.  Jordi, our tour guide, said that the sanctuary’s columns were inspired by the stalks of oleander plants with their double spiral structure, which provides stability while remaining thin.  When I asked Jordi about why the columns spiral one way in the bottom half and the reverse way above, Carrasco, a PHD Architect, excitedly grabbed my notebook and drew many complicated parabolas that were beyond my comprehension but were beautiful in themselves.  Architecture is incredibly complex mathematically, but architects like Carrasco (and Gaudí) use the equations as a paint brush.

He said it was all about letting the light in from the beautiful stained-glass windows.  And this is where the true universal genius of this building lies: light on stone, growing from cool blues in the morning to warm reds towards sunset, an image that can welcome everyone of every culture and religious affiliation.

You are dust, and to dust you shall return, same as the Apostles, chameleons, bassoon playing angels (well, maybe not them), and oleander plants.