architect in 1990, only three of the inte-
rior’s 56 columns (each one tied, in typi-
cal Gaudí fashion, to the liturgical calen-
dar) and a handful of the windows had
been completed.
But that was before the miracle of
modern tourism. Although many in Bar-
celona would eventually see them as
a curse, the millions of travelers who
began flooding the city at the start of the
new century meant salvation for the Sa-
grada Familia. As the number of visitors
rose—the church currently gets roughly
4 million per year, and each one pays an
entry fee that ranges from $16 to $43—
the foundation overseeing the basilica
found itself in the unfamiliar position of
having enough money to finish the main
nave. A soaring expanse with treelikepillars and multicolored stained-glass
windows that make it feel like a kaleido-
scopic forest, the nave was consecrated
by Pope Benedict in 2010.
In the process of completing the in-
terior, the architects realized something
else wondrous: Gaudí, a master of pure
geometry, had designed the entire com-
plex using just two key forms: a hyper-
boloid (which can look like a 3-D hour-
glass) and a paraboloid (akin to a Pringles
potato chip). Composed of straight lines^
A prefabricated panel is moved from
an enormous work site in Galera to
Barcelona, about 90 minutes away