Culture: Gaudí’s La Sagrada Família: Genius or folly?

Gaudí’s La Sagrada Família: Genius or folly?

Soaring above Barcelona, Antonio Gaudí’s church will eventually become the world’s tallest when it is finally finished. But is it also the most controversial religious building? Jonathan Glancey investigates.

 

BBC

“My client is in no hurry”. Antoni Gaudí believed that God had all the time in the world, so there was no need to rush the completion of the Catalan architect’s most ambitious work, the Sagrada Família. Often mistaken for Barcelona’s cathedral, the breathtaking Basilica and Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family, paid for entirely by private donations and sales of tickets to the 2.5 million people who visit it each year, is unlikely to be finished before 2026. Given that construction began in 1882, this is clearly the work not just of a singular and devoutly religious architect, but of several determined generations of dedicated professionals and enthusiasts.

When the final stone is set in place, the Sagrada Família will be the world’s tallest church, soaring 560-ft (170-m) above the Catalan capital. It will also be the strangest looking and possibly the most controversial place of worship ever built on such an epic scale. Looking for all the world like a cluster of gigantic stone termites’ nest, a colossal vegetable patch, a gingerbread house baked by the wickedest witch of all or perhaps a petrified forest, this hugely ambitious church has confounded architects, critics and historians ever since its unprecedented shape became apparent soon after World War I.

George Orwell said it was “one of the most hideous buildings in the world” and rather hoped it would be destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. Salvador Dalí spoke of its “terrifying and edible beauty”, saying it should be kept under a glass dome. Walter Gropius, master of right-angled architecture and founder of the Bauhaus, praised its technical perfection. Louis Sullivan, the great American architect, and “father of skyscrapers”, described it as “spirit symbolised in stone.”

Tourist trap?

When the mind-numbingly complex stone vault over the 150-ft (45.7-m) high nave was completed in 2010 and the basilica consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI, the debate reignited. According to Manuel Vicent, a columnist for the Madrid daily El Pais, “The only saving grace of the Temple of the Sagrada Família was the fact that it was unfinished, the dream of a genius driven crazy by mystic reveries. Now it will completed with the money of tourism, and when its walls are finally enclosed, there will be no one inside but Japanese tourists.”

The architect Enric Massip, a member of the Advisory Committee to the City of Barcelona, denounced the basilica as “an artificially inflated space lacking in soul.”

Intriguingly, Massip founded his own architectural studio in 1990 “with the goal to create a leading and innovative practice at the edge of architectural thinking”. Without spelling it out – he rarely wrote thoughts down, and drew precious little – this is very much what Antoni Gaudí had done when he developed a form of radical architecture that, in many ways, was far ahead of its time.

Those who take against the Sagrada Família do so largely because they refuse to see beyond its richly decorated and apparently arbitrary forms. Scratch the surface, though, and this mind-bending building proves to be a tour-de-force of highly sophisticated mathematics and advanced structural engineering. Gaudí based his designs on the complex forms we know today (or ought to know) as helicoids, hyperboloids and hyperbolic paraboloids. These are forms abstracted from nature and then translated into the design of the columns, vaults and intersecting geometric elements of the structure of the Sagrada Família. Look up at the vault crowning the interior of the basilica’s nave. Does this resemble a dense forest of trees with sunlight shining through it? Gaudí hoped you might see it like this. Everything he designed, he said, “comes from the Great Book of Nature”. His ‘textbooks’ were the mountains and caves he loved to explore.

In fact when Mark Burry, a 23-year-old New Zealander came to Barcelona in 1980, and became involved in trying to piece the fragments of Gaudí’s remaining architectural models of the Sagrada Família together, he was unable to make sense of their unfamiliar and demanding geometry until the peseta dropped and he understood that it was in the rock formations of mountains, among other natural phenomena, that Gaudí’s exceptional mathematical imagination had been rooted.

Burry went on to become both the executive architect of the Sagrada Família and a leading light in spatial design and computer programming at RMIT University, Melbourne. Devising parametric computer modelling techniques, adapted from the aerospace industry, Burry has been able to complete Gaudí’s designs. Working under Jordi Faulí I Oller I, director of works in Barcelona, he has even sped up the construction process by having stones cut by computer-driven machinery. What Burry and his associates in Barcelona find so very humbling is that Gaudí was able to work out such complex three-dimensional mathematical models in his mind’s-eye, using intuition alone.

Architectural miracle?

What few models and sketches there were by Gaudí’s hand were mostly destroyed by Catalan anarchists when they assaulted the Sagrada Família during the Spanish Civil War. They did, however, leave the architect’s tomb intact. For, whatever their grudge against General Franco and the Catholic Church, they knew full well that Gaudí was considered a saint by people of all classes and political beliefs. On 7 June 1926 Gaudí had been struck down by a tram at the intersection of Barcelona’s Carrer de Bailén and the Gran Via. Taxi drivers refused to take a man they mistook for a beggar to the city hospital. Local people took the wafer thin and ragged old man to the pauper’s hospital instead. When he was discovered there, Gaudí refused to be moved. “My place is here”, he said. Thousands lined the streets for his funeral.

It is difficult today to understand the upswell of religious feeling that had given rise to the Sagrada Família. The idea had come to Josep Maria Bocabella, a printer of religious books after a visit to Italy where he made a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Loreto, the church housing what is alleged to be the house in which the Archangel Gabriel appeared to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The house had been flown to Italy, it was said, by angels to save it from desecration in the 13th Century. Bocabella founded the Associació de Devots de Sant Josep which bought the land for the Sagrada Família and paid for the work. At its peak, these devotees of St Joseph, Mary’s husband, numbered 600,000. If faith could move mountains, it could build Gaudí’s basilica. The Association for the Beatification of Antoni Gaudí now campaigns for the architect to be made a saint.

When complete, the basilica will boast no fewer than eighteen spires – eight have been built so far 12 representing Christ’s apostles, four the evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), one the Blessed Virgin Mary and the tallest, Christ the Saviour.

It may be difficult for puritan eyes, or those with a decided preference for straight lines and minimalist aesthetics to look at, and yet this utterly brilliant feat of imaginative construction has inspired designs by some of the world’s finest engineers and architects over the past century, Oscar Niemeyer, Frei Otto and Pier Luigi Nervi among them. It will continue to haunt the imagination of generations to come for whom its architect may well come to be known, officially, as Saint Antoni Gaudí.

Current Affairs: Ebola fears in Alcorcón

Ebola fears in Alcorcón: ‘how does this happen? It’s really scary’

At hospital where nurse tested positive, some patients have dared to show up but many wonder how worried they should be

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As she waited for her bus next to an advert urging people to donate money for the fight against Ebola overseas, Elena Felican could only shake her head at how close the threat posed by the virus now felt to her in Spain.

“My sister called me first thing this morning, telling me not to go to near the hospital,” said the catering worker. “She told me the patient lived in Alcorcón. How does this happen? It’s really scary.”

Few details have emerged about the first person known to have contracted the Ebola virus outside west Africa. The Spanish nurse, who tested positive on Monday, was part of a team that cared for two elderly Spanish missionaries who both died after being evacuated to Madrid for treatment.

On Tuesday night her husband said she had followed all the regulations. “She did all that they told her to. At no moment was she worried about being infected,” he told El Mundo. The pair had intended to go on holiday, but changed their plans after he injured his leg, he told the newspaper in a phone interview from the room where he has been isolated.

He complained that health authorities had told him his dog would have to be put down because it had been in contact with his wife. “They told me that if I didn’t give them my authorisation, they would get a court order and enter the house by force to kill the dog. Then what will they do next? Sacrifice me too?”

In Alcorcón, a city of 170,000 people on the outskirts of Madrid, many wondered just how worried they should be.

“She might have been living in this neighbourhood for days with Ebola,” said Felican. “Did she go to the supermarket? The gym? We don’t know anything.” Three primary schools ringed the hospital where the nurse had tested positive, she pointed out, and all of them were open on Tuesday.

Her concerns were echoed inside the imposing hospital. Juan Pulido, who sat casually flipping through a newspaper while he waited for his wife to finish her appointment, said his family had urged him not to go. “Every day I sit here, waiting for my wife. I decided today would be no exception,” said the retiree, brushing off their worries. “But it seems like nobody else dared to come – it’s empty today.”

The infected nurse was transported to Madrid’s Carlos III hospital late on Monday. She was placed in isolation, as was her husband, who has shown no signs of the virus. Health officials said on Tuesday they were monitoring 50 more people who may have come into contact with the nurse.

Authorities placed a second nurse from the same team in isolation after she complained of diarrhoea. Noting that she did not have a fever, the most common initial symptom for Ebola, doctors said her initial test results were negative.

A man who had recently travelled from Nigeria to Spain was also in quarantine at the same hospital but tested negative for Ebola in his first test.

Health authorities said they had two priorities: compiling a list of all the potential contacts that the woman had before being hospitalised, and determining exactly how she had been infected.

The nurse had helped care for Miguel Pajares, 75, who was the first person to be repatriated to European soil for treatment in August, but she is thought to have become infected while looking after Manuel García Viejo, 69, who died in Madrid after being evacuated from Sierra Leone two weeks ago.

The nurseShe would have entered García Viejo’s room twice, said Antonio Alemany, from the regional government of Madrid. The first time to was to change a nappy and the second time was to collect material from his room after he died.

After complaining of a fever on 30 September, the nurse was told to check herself into hospital if her temperature exceeded 38.6C. Fernando Simón, of Spain’s health ministry, acknowledged on Tuesday that it might have been better to have admitted her to hospital right away despite her not showing serious symptoms.

When she was admitted on Monday, the nurse remained in a bed in the emergency room, separated from other patients only by curtains, while waiting for her test results to come back, hospital staff said.

Several associations representing health professionals in Spain painted a picture of a healthcare system reeling from cutbacks, drastically underfunded to tackle the challenge of Ebola, and led by a health ministry creating policy on the fly.

Elena Moral, of the CSI-F, a union that represents healthcare professionals, said the delay in admitting the nurse to hospital hinted at deep flaws in the protocol. “A patient suspected of having Ebola and a history of working with Ebola patients should have been put in the first ambulance they could find.”

She dismissed any suggestion of human error, pointing to a lack of training, infrastructure and safety measures. In some cases, training for health professionals dealing with Ebola was limited to a 15- or 20-minute talk, she said.

In July a group of nurses in Madrid brought a complaint before a judge in Madrid over the “lack of training and knowledge regarding protocols” when it came to treating potential Ebola cases.

Moral also laid blame on the impact of austerity measures on the Spanish healthcare system. “We’ve been protesting for a long time that the dismantling of the Carlos III hospital could provoke extreme situations like this one.”

In recent years, she said, the Carlos III hospital was closed, gutted of its emergency rooms and then turned into a hospital specialising in tropical diseases.

“The repatriation of the two missionaries turned the hospital into something just short of a field hospital. Authorities activated the protocols without keeping in mind the actual state of the hospital.”

Opposition politicians called on the health minister, Ana Mato, to explain the safety lapses, while around 200 health professionals gathered outside a hospital in Madrid calling for her resignation.

The European commission said it had written to Mato “to obtain some clarification” as to how the nurse had become infected. “There is obviously a problem somewhere,” said the commission spokesman, Frédéric Vincent.

Spanish health authorities said medics treating Ebola patients in Spain followed the protocols laid out by the World Health Organisation, but their claims were widely disputed. While level 4 protective equipment is required to attend to Ebola patients, healthcare workers in Spain who treated the missionaries had only level 2 equipment, said Juan Carlos Mejias, of Satse, a union that represents nurses. “Level 4 is what’s being used in other European countries.”

In August, when Satse learned of plans to repatriate a patient with Ebola to Spain for treatment, it asked the health ministry for a written description of the protocols that would be used. “How many nurses would be involved? How would the nurses be monitored afterwards?” said Mejias. He said the union received no response, suggesting “there was a serious improvisation in how the situation was handled”.

Inside Alcorcón hospital, two women working at the hospital gift shop said they knew only what had been reported in the media. “Our co-worker left after her shift last night wondering why there were journalists outside the hospital. Nobody told us anything or warned us that we should be careful,” said one. “At least they could have given us hand sanitiser.”