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Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

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Re: Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

#41

Post by Scoundreller »

My favourite part of the tour was when they mention that Gaudi died in a tram accident, without any further details.

So I had to research that part on my own.

Trams at the time ran at around 10kph.

Supposedly he saw a tram coming, took a step back and got hit by another tram.

As his main concerns were architecture and the church, he looked homeless.

Some time after the accident, someone did call for a doctor who declared him dead.

Some time later, he was brought to a hospital, provided the care that a beggar would receive and died 3 days later. Only being identified some time after being admitted.

Given that it was 1926 and he was almost 74, it’s hard to say how much immediate care would have helped anyway.

Re: Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

#42

Post by Schiphol »

Many locals (and at any rate this local) see the Sagrada Família as it currently is as a rather unhappy travesty. There are no construction plans by Gaudí, just a few sketches, and what architects are doing is mostly theme-park architecture: making concrete look like stone, for example. It would have been much preferable to leave it as it was in 1926.

Re: Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

#43

Post by dmos62 »

StavrosK wrote: post #21
JorgeGT wrote: post #2

The article misses an important bit of info: when the construction started, the Sagrada Familia was not in Barcelona, but in an independent municipality, Sant Martí de Provençals. It was to this municipality that the building permit was requested, not to Barcelona, which would annex the municipality and with it, the Sagrada Familia, 15 years later. Plus, most of the documentation regarding the building, including pla…

I was very impressed when I visited the museum under the Sagrada Familia and saw photos of the beginning of construction, when the church was in the middle of large hay fields with no buildings around. Now it's nearly in the middle of the city!

I scoured for old photos of it, didn't find many:

1915 http://suitelife.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/736px-Sagrad...

1915 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/La_Sagra...

Re: Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

#44

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

Schiphol wrote: post #42

Many locals (and at any rate this local) see the Sagrada Família as it currently is as a rather unhappy travesty. There are no construction plans by Gaudí, just a few sketches, and what architects are doing is mostly theme-park architecture: making concrete look like stone, for example. It would have been much preferable to leave it as it was in 1926.

Not an expert in the subject, but my understanding is that Gaudí was aware that the project would not be completed in his lifetime, but wanted it to be completed anyway, and even counted with future technology for help (i.e. some of his ideas could not be realized at his time, but he thought technology would advance enough to implement them after his death).

So leaving it as it was in 1926 would actually have been against Gaudí's will, and from that standpoint, continuing it was the right thing to do. I will not comment on decisions taken on the particular execution, as I don't have the knowledge, although as a layman I did like it a lot when I visited around 3 years ago.

Re: Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

#45

Post by dmos62 »

6nf wrote: post #18

I found this old rendering of what still needs to be built - the scale is just fantastic! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69COc7UhvbY

Wow. Just when I think it's done, another structure emerges, bigger than the last. It's pretty impressive that we can sustain projects like these when they offer only cultural value.

Re: Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

#46

Post by filmor »

runlevel1 wrote: post #36
dzdt wrote: post #16

The engineering work for Sagrada Familia was insanely clever. Gaudi build a scale model including accurate weights for the building materials, upside-down, out of strings and weights. That way he could design non-vertical pillars that branch like trees and where all the stresses were carried by compression through the stonework. It is really a marvel of pre-computer technical design! [1] https://memetician.livejourna…

This video explains the use of chains to determine arch shape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlL6ZHChhQE

This is a great video, thanks. The mentioned catenary shape is a cosh (Cosinus Hyperbolicus, i.e. 1/2(exp(x) + exp(-x)) or cos(ix)) and decidedly not a parabola.

Wikipedia contains a derivation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary (the one on the German Wikipedia is a bit more explicit)

Re: Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

#47

Post by inferiorhuman »

Schiphol wrote: post #42

Many locals (and at any rate this local) see the Sagrada Família as it currently is as a rather unhappy travesty. There are no construction plans by Gaudí, just a few sketches, and what architects are doing is mostly theme-park architecture: making concrete look like stone, for example. It would have been much preferable to leave it as it was in 1926.

Many locals (and at any rate this local) see the Sagrada Família as it currently is as a rather unhappy travesty. There are no construction plans by Gaudí, just a few sketches, and what architects are doing is mostly theme-park architecture: making concrete look like stone, for example. It would have been much preferable to leave it as it was in 1926.

Coming from a city that is having a bit of an identity crisis and relies heavily on tourist money, the impression I got of Barcelona is that the city itself is very much a theme park for English tourists. It really seemed like Catalan culture was whitewashed pretty successfully (e.g. pintxos everywhere). In terms of combating that theme-park mentality, Sagrada Família is certainly not where I'd start (then again I don't live in Barcelona).

Parc Güell was especially over the top and cartoonish, less in the architecture, but more in the throngs of selfie sticks. It's gone from a thoughtfully designed park to a caricature.

Sagrada Família was, OTOH, a pretty stark contrast. I did the self-guided audio tour and went up into the Nativity facade (not the newer one) and was just floored. I fully expected the audio tour to be full of self-promotion, but even the 99PI episode on Sagrada Família left me with the impression that Gaudí wanted to see SF completed and that currently painstaking effort is being made to keep things as true to his desires as possible.

Obviously things won't be done exactly as Gaudí would've done them, but that's an artifact of technology changing over time. Much like any other aged building, Sagrada Família would've needed a restoration at some point. For better or worse, the primary function of Sagrada Família is as a museum / tourist destination and it's been that way for many years.

Re: Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

#48

Post by toyg »

dmos62 wrote: post #43
StavrosK wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was very impressed when I visited the museum under the Sagrada Familia and saw photos of the beginning of construction, when the church was in the middle of large hay fields with no buildings around. Now it's nearly in the middle of the city!

I scoured for old photos of it, didn't find many: 1915 http://suitelife.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/736px-Sagrad... 1915 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/La_Sagra...

We should remember that this was more than 100 years ago. 100 years is a long time. A lot of our collective subconscious is still acting like we’re stuck in 1982, but the XX century is long over.

Re: Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

#49

Post by spanxx »

nraynaud wrote: post #28
clarkmoody wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

City: That's a nice, world-famous church you're building there. It would be a shame if something ... happened to it. Classic city government thug move.

Hum, the history of the Catholic Church and democracy is a bit special in Spain, in particular in Catalonia.

Care to explain?

Re: Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

#50

Post by yiyus »

Schiphol wrote: post #42

Many locals (and at any rate this local) see the Sagrada Família as it currently is as a rather unhappy travesty. There are no construction plans by Gaudí, just a few sketches, and what architects are doing is mostly theme-park architecture: making concrete look like stone, for example. It would have been much preferable to leave it as it was in 1926.

Most cathedrals took generations to build and diverged from the initial plans during their construction. It is not uncommon that even architectonic styles changed, and the final result was a mixture of romanic and gothic, for example.

Sagrada Familia may be an unhappy travesty, but every cathedral is, and few have such a consistent style. Even our cities are unhappy travesties, and I do not think that leaving the unfinished works of deceased architects unfinished would change that.

You have all the right to dislike how it is being done, and it may be not exactly what Gaudí thought, but trying to finish it was, in my opinion, the right decision. When you are in the middle of a task that will take generations, it makes sense trying to continue even if some accident happens, like your main architect getting killed by a tram or documents getting lost.

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