To get a sense of Sagrada Família’s popularity with YouTubers, you have only to take a look at the related Open Culture posts linked below. As will hardly escape your attention, most subjects that consistently draw the attention of the GoPro class are not nineteenth-century Catholic churches. But Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece, whose construction alone has survived him by a century now, transcends many boundaries of intellectual and cultural interest: history channels feature it, travel channels feature it, religious channels feature it, and, of course, architecture channels feature it. Most recently, Sagrada Família has appeared on The B1M, which is all about construction — the more ambitious, the better.
We’ve previously posted B1M videos on the Flatiron Building, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the extraterrestrially curving work of Zaha Hadid, and every generation of New York skyscraper. That selection only hints at the range of structures to which the channel’s creator Fred Mills has paid close attention, and yet it’s Sagrada Família that puts him at a loss. “There’s parts of this building where you can’t help but describe what you’re seeing,” he says as he stands in its stained glass-illuminated central nave. “There’s other moments where you don’t have the words; it’s just emotion.” Entering it feels, as he describes it, “less like you’re standing inside a building, and more like you’ve been transported to the threshold of heaven itself.”
How does Sagrada Família create this experience for its visitors, even in its incomplete state? Some will credit divine inspiration; others, Gaudí’s sheer architectural genius. Mills seeks out more concrete forms of explanation, right down to the very blocks of stone used to build its towers. Granted much more access than ordinary tourists, who now come at a rate of about 1,500 per hour, he goes all the way up to see the massive cross assembled on the church’s pinnacle, and all the way down to the basement workshop where intricate models test the myriad possible ways to realize Gaudí’s vision. For when he died in 1926, having been hit by a tram, the plans he left behind didn’t exactly explain all the details about how to finish what resembled no other building ever erected, religious or otherwise.
As Mills points out, subsequently developed technologies have helped keep Sagrada Família’s now 144-year-long construction proceeding apace. And though great celebration attended the topping-out of its central tower high above the streets of Barcelona this past February, more work remains to be done. Completing its interior, roofs, and side chapels, as well as the grand façade with its main entrance, should take another decade, depending on how the relevant disputes involving local residents and the city council play out. Still, it seems likely indeed that Sagrada Família will finally be finished within our lifetimes, which makes for the kind of drama that will keep attracting both large- and small-time documentarians. “I’m not sure we’re ever going to see anything else quite like it,” Mills says, which hints at another reason for all the content-creator fascination: though it may well be completed in our age, Sagrada Família could hardly be less of our age.
Related Content:
LEGO Lets You Build Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Its Largest Set Ever
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
