Instead, he focussed on a much different project: a basilica that was to rise on the outskirts of the burgeoning city. He wasn’t the project’s original architect—a more conventional designer, Francisco de Paula del Villar, had quit after a budget dispute. Gaudí pushed the plans in a radical direction. The world, he believed, had seen enough ogival windows and flying buttresses on cathedrals. “Let us have architecture without archeology,” he proclaimed. The project eventually became Gaudí’s sole obsession. With the basilica, he saw an opportunity to use innovative forms to express traditional ideas—he became the Gerard Manley Hopkins of architecture. He imagined a Bible made in stone: the façades would tell the story of Jesus, from the Nativity to the Passion to the Resurrection.
According to Puig Boada, when Gaudí started working on the Sagrada Família, he would arrive at the site each day in a carriage, wearing a short beige overcoat with large boots, and peremptorily give orders without dismounting. But as he worked on the church his taste for finery declined; his clothes fell into tatters, and he held them together with safety pins and elastic. “He looked like a beggar,” Faulí said. In 1925, Gaudí began living in his workshop at the Sagrada Família site, so that he could devote all his time to the project.
On June 7, 1926, after Gaudí’s workday ended, he set out toward a church in the Gothic Quarter where he liked to say evening prayers. “ He was always thinking about the Sagrada Família when he was walking,” Faulí told me. As Gaudí crossed a street, he saw a tram coming—and, as Faulí tells the story, he threw himself backward only to have “another one hit him.” Gaudí fell to the ground with a severe head wound and several broken ribs. Bystanders, likely assuming that he was a vagrant, shied away from helping.
He died three days later, at the age of seventy-three. “In Barcelona a genius has died!” proclaimed the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya. “In Barcelona a saint has passed away! Even the stones cry for him.” La Vanguardia was more astringent: “The marvellous artist of the Sagrada Família has ceased to exist. And how? In the most vulgar way. A victim of a tram accident.”
With the hundredth anniversary of Gaudí’s “vulgar” demise approaching, Faulí agreed to let me observe the progress he and his team were making on the site. I first met him in May, 2024. He greeted me outside the basilica. Church officials had by then rescinded their unkeepable promise to finish by 2026, blaming delays caused by the pandemic. Faulí explained to me that the current goal was to have the Jesus tower complete by the end of 2025, so that the full height of the building could be celebrated on the centenary of Gaudí’s death. “Done” would be a state of mind.
To my eyes, the building looked nearly finished, but Faulí suggested that I look at the side of the church where Gaudí had wanted to depict the history of humanity, from Adam and Eve to the Last Judgment. It had no façade, narthex, portal, angel statues, or stone credos. Metal fencing covered some of the exterior. During the pandemic, Faulí had spent some time on a treatment, but the design was still being worked on; half his team was focussed on it now. How long would the façade take to complete? He startled me with the answer: “I would say maybe twelve years.”
Faulí, who has his own família—a wife and a daughter—was sixty-four at the time. Would he still be around when the Sagrada Família was truly done? “Lo que Díos quiera,” he replied—“Whatever God wishes.” At one point, we peered over the shoulder of one of his architects, who was designing a snail-shaped stairwell for the unfinished façade on a computer. Faulí pointed at the screen and explained, “It’s a curling staircase to get you to the roof, but you also have a vertical column with electricity and data lines, which also plays a structural role, because it will help fuse the walls of the nave to the façade.”
Faulí and I crossed the Plaça de Gaudí, to the northeast of the church. It was a touristic melee. Influencers were posing for TikToks with the towers as their background. Above them loomed the Nativity façade, the only one that Gaudí had come close to finishing. It’s a fever dream of ecclesiastically symbolic ornaments. There are stone renderings of a turtle and a tortoise, to connote the stability of the cosmos, and a donkey—Gaudí ordered that a living animal be hoisted in a sling up the façade, so that he could capture the beast’s form more accurately. (“It is mad to try to represent a fictional object,” he once wrote in his journal.) The slaughter of the innocents that follows the birth of Jesus in the Book of Matthew is depicted by limp infants that Gaudí modelled on casts of actual stillborn babies.
“We’re going to need the siege ladder, sire.” Cartoon by Frank Cotham Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
The entirety of the façade seems more poured than carved. As we walked toward the building, a mother remarked to her child that the Nativity figures “look like they’re melting.” The effect was enhanced by the erosion caused by a century of pollution on the sandstone, which was originally obtained from Montjuïc. There is now netting on some of the towers built during Gaudí’s lifetime, to facilitate restoration. Even as Faulí finishes one part of the church, he has to fix older ones.