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Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia gets building permit after 137 years

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51–60 of 65 posts

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

#51
post #50

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 unf…

I'd say our conception of art, and architecture in particular, has changed substantially since the heyday of the Gothic cathedral. We now don't think of buildings as a communal, multigenerational effort.

> every cathedral is

Actually, contemporary cathedrals (of which more than a few have been built in the XXth and XXIst centuries) are typically completed in a reasonable timeframe. 5 years for Moneo's Our Lady of the Angels; 3 years for Hartman's Cathedral of Christ the Light, and so on.

By the way, the Sagrada Família is not a cathedral, but a basilica, but that is neither here nor there :)

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

#52
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are upside down strings an accurate model for compressed stone?

To an excellent approximation, a structure made entirely of string and weights has tension on the strings but no shear stress on the string. (This is because string is floppy — if you pull gently on a string, you’ll pull the other end toward you but not sideways.). If the whole structure dangles without moving, that means that all the forces (tension and gravity) balance everywhere. If you flip the sign of all forces…

why is this approximate and not exact?

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

#53
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4ngemodell https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettenlinie_(Mathematik)

NB, the line taken by the cables of a suspension bridge with a deck of uniform weight is a parabola. I think this is what causes the popular confusion.

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

#54

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 decl…

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

Career goals. I feel like I'm already halfway there.

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

#55
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an excellent approximation, a structure made entirely of string and weights has tension on the strings but no shear stress on the string. (This is because string is floppy — if you pull gently on a string, you’ll pull the other end toward you but not sideways.). If the whole structure dangles without moving, that means that all the forces (tension and gravity) balance everywhere. If you flip the sign of all forces…

why is this approximate and not exact?

Strings really do have some stiffness. In a piano, this causes harmonics to be slightly more than an octave apart, leading to stretched tuning. Cotton strings won’t be as still as metal strings, but the effect still exists.

Another issue is that Gaudí used a bunch of little weights instead of weighted strings. This means that he’s modeling stone columns with all the weight concentrated in a few places, which isn’t quite right.

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

#56
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…

Sagrada Familia looks like an amalgamation of Spanish culture, its incomplete nature acts like an amalgamation of Spanish culture, and your story only reinforces that

It doesn't matter how it got there, that history IS Spanish culture and it doesn't make anyone sympathetic to the outcome.

Its just "yep."

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

#57
post #9

Yeah, the whole affair was about Barcelona getting a cut of the money from Sagrada Familia. > Barcelona officials said the city will be paid 4.6 million euros ($5.2 million) in fees under an agreement negotiated with a foundation devoted to completing and preserving La Sagrada Familia.

Yeah I was waiting for the article to explain why the building permit mattered until they mentioned the fee millions of tourists pay to go see it every day and it became obvious the city just wanted a piece of that. Why else would they demand $5.2M for a building permit.

I would expect there are some infrastructure requirements for that level of foot traffic in the area too?

Although there’s a huge halo effect in terms of taxing nearby businesses too.

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

#58
post #48
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure exactly what point you are trying to make.

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

#59
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…

Sagrada Familia looks like an amalgamation of Spanish culture, its incomplete nature acts like an amalgamation of Spanish culture, and your story only reinforces that It doesn't matter how it got there, that history IS Spanish culture and it doesn't make anyone sympathetic to the outcome. Its just "yep."

OP was simply adding details of the history - not sure why you are taking a defensive tone

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

#60
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Care to explain?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francoist_Spain#Roman_Catholic...
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