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A basilica with no finish date, and why nobody can just look up the plans
The Sagrada Família was begun in 1882 as a conventional neo-Gothic church. Antoni Gaudí took over the project in 1883, redesigned it completely, and spent the last decades of his life on it, latterly living on the site. He was killed by a tram in 1926 with a small fraction of the building complete, and work has continued, with interruptions, ever since. It was consecrated as a basilica in 2010, while still a building site, and it remains one — visitors buy tickets to walk through an active construction project, which is part of what makes it unlike any other famous building. Two things explain why finishing it has taken so long. The first is the funding: it has never had public money, and is built entirely from donations and ticket revenue, which means the rate of construction has tracked the rate of visitors. The second is the method. Gaudí did not work primarily from drawings. He designed in three dimensions, using plaster models, hanging chain models to work out the catenary curves his structure depends on, and instructions given on site. A great deal of that workshop was destroyed in 1936 during the Civil War. What followed has therefore been reconstruction and interpretation as much as execution — fragments of models pieced back together, and later computer modelling used to resolve the geometry — which is also why the project has never been free of argument. Critics have said for decades that continuing without Gaudí is a mistake; the builders reply that he expected others to finish it and designed a system rather than a set of instructions. A completion date for the central tower has been announced and revised more than once, and the honest answer to Alex's question is the guide's: for the whole work, no date is given. What is worth knowing before a visit is practical. Tickets are timed and sell out, as at the Alhambra in lesson 60. The towers require a separate ticket and a lift, and the descent is by a narrow spiral staircase. And the thing actually worth the money is not the exterior everybody photographs but the interior at the right time of day: the nave is designed as a forest, the columns branch, and the stained glass is arranged so that the light is cool on one side and warm on the other. Go in the late afternoon and look west.