Time July 8, 2019(thereby making them easier to build) but
creating curves (and enabling the natu-
ralistic shapes Gaudí adored), the two
structures were a sort of blueprint for the
basilica’s different elements.
“It was like learning a new language—
we weren’t just learning the vocabulary,
but the grammar as well,” says Faulí.
“Once we learned to form these shapes
and combine them with each other, it was
just a matter of following the rules he had
laid out and applying them to new col-
umns, new vaults.”
As the know-how and financing fell
into place, the foundation began to study
what it would take to actually finish the
church. Which is how British structural
engineer Tristram Carfrae, the deputy
chairman of Arup, the design and engi-
neering firm that built the Sydney Opera
House, found himself walking out of a
meeting in 2014 with the Sagrada Familia
foundation and thinking, “Did that really
happen? Do we really have the opportu-
nity to work on the most fantastic project
in the world?”
They did. But they still had to build
10 more towers, among them the 564-ft.
Jesus tower, which would be the tall-
est structure in town. There were other
daunting questions. “How do we speed
up the rate of construction by a factor
of 10 so that we can complete this by
2026?” Carfrae reels off. “How do we
account for the fact that as you com-
plete the church, the available area on
site for assembling things diminishes?
And finally, how do we do all that with
the quality that the church deserves and
Gaudí’s vision demands?”
Part of the answer lies at Galera, a
sprawling work site 90 minutes north
of Barcelona, where twin cranes rise like
latter- day monoliths over the hills. Like
each of the 50 or so workers there, Valentí
Anglès has a very specific job: he uses a
small, motorized crane to slide multi-
kilo “anchor” blocks onto an interlock-
ing row of granite stones that will be fixed
to a steel plate and bound together into
panels. Because the anchor blocks have
holes through which steel rods will be in-
serted, Anglès can only afford an exceed-ingly tiny margin of error. “If I miss it by
a millimeter or two,” he says, “we have to
break the whole thing and start over.” The
panels that Anglès helps build are Arup’s
solution to the complex problem of build-
ing the Sagrada Familia’s towers. To make
them light enough, the engineers could
have built a steel frame and clad its sur-
face with stone. “That didn’t fit with
our notion of quality—from the inside it
would have looked like a Hollywood set,”
says Carfrae. Instead, they make the pan-
els entirely of stone—albeit blocks only
300 mm thick, rather than a cathedral’s
more typical 1 or 2 m.
That the panels can be prefabricated
off-site matters too. There are masonry
and carpentry workshops on the grounds
of the Sagrada Familia itself, but the
craftspeople there tend to work on the
smaller decorative elements, since they
lack the space to put together a single 6-m
stone panel. But with 900 panels in all to
make for the Jesus, Mary and four evan-
gelist towers, even the Galera site isn’t big
enough to hold everything at once.
That’s why the Sagrada Familia has ad-
opted a model that would be familiar to
anyone who grew up in Detroit. The key^
About 400 panels have been built at
Galera, transported to Barcelona and
hoisted atop the Sagrada Familia