The History of the Sagrada Família

The Sagrada Família began as someone else's idea. The Association of Devotees of Saint Joseph — a Catholic lay organisation — commissioned architect Francisco de Paula del Villar to build an expiatory church in Barcelona's Eixample district. Del Villar's design was conventional neo-Gothic: a worthy but unremarkable project for the era.

Disagreements with the building committee over costs and materials led del Villar to resign within a year. The commission passed to a young Catalan architect named Antoni Gaudí. He was 31 years old, already recognised for his work on the neo-Gothic Palau Episcopal in Astorga, but not yet the towering figure he would become. The Sagrada Família would be both his greatest challenge and the singular obsession of his life.

Gaudí did not simply continue del Villar's design. He reimagined the entire project from first principles. Where del Villar had planned a conventional Gothic elevation with flying buttresses, Gaudí developed a structural system based on the geometry of nature — branching columns derived from the branching of trees, hyperboloid vaults derived from the curvature of shells, and parabolic arches derived from the catenary — the shape a chain makes when hanging freely.

He also expanded the programme dramatically. Del Villar had planned a single-nave church. Gaudí designed a Latin-cross basilica with five naves, eighteen towers representing the twelve apostles, the four evangelists, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ himself — the central tower rising to 172.5 metres, one metre shorter than Montjuïc to ensure the natural landscape remained the dominant feature of Barcelona's skyline.

By 1914, Gaudí had resigned from every other commission. He spent the final twelve years of his life working exclusively on the Sagrada Família, increasingly consumed by the project's theological and structural ambition. He moved into the workshop on site, dressed as a workman, and devoted his entire existence to the building. He was struck by a tram on 7 June 1926 and died three days later. He is buried in the crypt he built.

The 1936 fire in Gaudí's workshop during the Spanish Civil War was a catastrophe. Anarchists burned the building and destroyed most of Gaudí's original plaster models, drawings, and documents. Reconstruction — first physical, then computational — became a project in itself.

From the 1950s onward, a succession of dedicated architects — Domènec Sugrañes, Isidre Puig Boada, Lluís Bonet i Garí, Jordi Bonet — worked to extrapolate Gaudí's intentions from surviving fragments and his geometric principles. The Passion façade was completed to designs by sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs, whose stark angular figures were controversial but faithful to Gaudí's theological programme for that façade.

Computer-aided design in the 2000s transformed the pace of construction. The interior columns and vaults, which Gaudí had designed using physical hanging-chain models (catenary arches), could now be precisely specified in digital space and fabricated with industrial accuracy. The nave was completed and the basilica consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI on 7 November 2010 — when it also received UNESCO World Heritage status.

In 2026, the centenary of Gaudí's death, the Tower of Jesus Christ reached its final height of 172.5 metres — making the Sagrada Família the world's tallest church, surpassing Ulm Minster. The construction of the Glory façade and its surrounding esplanade continues.