MAYBE George Orwell was exercising the sense of humour some people think he didn’t have when he called Barcelona’s most celebrated architectural landmark “hideous” and suggested it could be improved only by dynamite. If so, it must have been part of the joke that he pretended vagueness as to what exactly the building was.
In Homage to Catalonia,his memoir of the Spanish civil war, he neglects to mention it by name – the Sagrada Familia – or to explain its reputation as Antoni Gaudí's unfinished masterpiece: a point no modern guide book fails to make.
Instead he refers only to an anonymous “modern cathedral” built in the shape of four giant “hock bottles”; and accuses Barcelona’s anarchists of showing “bad taste” when, during their orgy of church burning after the start of the war in 1936, they chose to spare this one alone.
In Orwell’s defence, the Sagrada Familia – despite already being half a century old when he saw it – was nowhere near complete then, and had yet to acquire the iconic status that makes it a compulsory stop on city tours these days. Another seven decades later, in fact, it is still a long way from being finished. But in the meantime it has become Europe’s most famous work in progress.
And just for the record, if not blown up by the anarchists as Orwell would have preferred, the Sagrada Familia did not completely escape the anti-clerical rampages of the civil war either. On the outbreak of hostilities, mobs did indeed attack the cathedral, setting fire to Gaudí’s studio and with it most of his drawings.
This was almost as big a setback as the architect’s death 10 years earlier, when he was run over by a tram, at the age of 73. He had spent the last four decades of his life working on the project and, without the drawings, at least some of his ideas died with him.
It has to be said, even now, that Orwell had a point about the cathedral’s external appearance. Whatever it is, the Sagrada Familia is not pretty. Even the bit he saw (which was Gaudí’s attempt to win popular acceptance for the design before the more aesthetically challenging parts were added), looks like a series of grotesque rock formations on the inside of a cave. And that was the intention.
This is the Nativity facade, to be exact, details of which feature scenes from the birth and early life of Jesus. The opposite facade, built after Gaudí’s death in keeping with his known or presumed plans (including four matching spires), represents the Passion: with harsher lines, columns suggesting the human skeleton, and very little relief.
The only concession to cheerfulness here is the word “Sanctus”, displayed repeatedly half way up the spires in red, orange, and yellow letters, and so incongruous that a member of our party, unfamiliar with Latin, thought it was the logo of the building contractors.
Nobody would be more surprised at the cathedral’s still-emerging appearance, surely, than the devotees of St Joseph who originally planned it, laying the foundation stone in 1882 and only acquiring Gaudí as the chief architect a year later after the first man resigned. And yet, in advancing their other cause – Catalan nationalism – the building has exceeded their wildest dreams.
Maybe Barcelona’s secular cathedral, the one where Lionel Messi and Co perform regularly, has done more to promote Catalonia’s identity worldwide.
But for good or bad, the Sagrada Familia is Barcelona’s architectural signature. It still dominates the skyline in the flattest part of the city, where it was deliberately placed, equidistant from the mountains and the sea. And unlike the Eiffel Tower, Gaudí’s creation doesn’t even have a restaurant half way up where critics can go to enjoy a view of the city unobstructed by it.
Pending completion of the third facade – representing the Resurrection – the cathedral’s construction more than compensates in evoking eternity. After 127 years and counting, four spindly yellow cranes still rise above the hock bottles, and the interior of the church remains a building site: complete with wheelbarrows, ladders, hoists, and pallets laden with bags of cement and plaster.
The finished crypt is a functioning parish church, and has been since the 1930s. The vaults of the main nave are now also complete and it is hoped that religious services will be celebrated there soon. For now, however, the overground part of the building must make do with hosting masses of a different kind.
To their original plan for an “expiatory” cathedral, funded entirely by donations from the penitent, the founders have recruited tourists: three million of them every year, simultaneously enabling the work with their paid visits while slowing it down.
A range of completion dates are mentioned in the promotional literature. One says 2017; another 2026. The audio guide speaks vaguely of hoping to see the project finished with the next “two decades”. But it all sounds rather optimistic. And apart perhaps from Gaudí and Orwell, nobody is holding his breath.