The controversy is especially keen because Gaudí died in 1926, and the basilica in its current form may be less than half of his original design. Others say that the building should never be finished, and that its perpetual state of construction is central to its charm. It’s impossible to estimate how much construction of the Sagrada Família has cost over the years, but the annual costs of construction and maintenance run to around €25 million a year, paid for by the site’s three million annual visitors as well as private donors.

In 2011, the writer and self-proclaimed Gaudí skeptic P.J. O’Rourke wrote in The Atlantic about his attempt to use Gaudí to understand the whimsical shapes of 21st-century architecture (Read: Frank Gehry). He pondered whether La Sagrada Família would always be under construction, standing as a constantly morphing monument to the architect’s genius.

It would shake the faith back into anyone to look at Gaudí’s depiction of all creation melting in love on the Nativity facade. I behold, with strained peripheral vision, the nave and aisles that hold 14,000 worshippers. And these are the least interesting parts of the building.



Gaudí considered the Gothic style imperfect, because buttresses are needed to hold up the soaring magnificence. The house of God should stand on its own. Gaudí found solutions in plant and animal forms, in hyperboloids, paraboloids, and helicoids (respectively, saddle-shaped curves, cones, and spirals). And he made use of fractals, structures that split into smaller replications of themselves, the way broccoli does … If a Gothic cathedral is (as some have said, misapplying their Shakespeare) a sermon in stone, then La Sagrada Família is a sermon in broccoli. And none the less powerful for it.

In the end, O’Rourke concluded that “Gaudí’s architecture isn’t whimsical at all,” but that rather, he is God’s own engineer. And in 11 years, his vision—or at least the amalgamation of his inspiration and that of the architects who’ve presided over it in his absence—will finally be complete.

In Photos: One Hundred and Thirty-Two Years of Gaudí