When the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi died in 1926, his masterwork, the Sagrada Familia—the subject of a new show at the City University of New York’s Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture—consisted of a section of an apse and one heroic portal. But that so-called Nativity Facade, with details that seemed utterly original and yet already ancient, made the unfinished building world-famous.
It seemed unlikely that the cathedral would be completed after Gaudi’s death. For one thing, nearly all of his drawings and models were destroyed at the onset of the Spanish Civil War. For another, the size of the job, including a 560-foot tower, dwarfed the resources available for much of the 20th century. The first time I visited, around 1977, a few stone carvers worked at a seemingly glacial pace; completion by these Sisyphus-es would have taken centuries.
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