This church was designed by architect Anotoni Gaudi in the Guell Colony, near Barcelona, Spain. It was constructed between 1898 and 1917, although never really finished. The Guell Colony was a factory town built outside of Bacelona by the wealthy industrialist Guell family. In order to evade union activity, they moved their textile mill outside the city, and built a town from scratch to house the workers. Of course, a town needed a church, and Gaudi got the commission. As with much of Gaudi's work, the project is still incomplete. Gaudi left drawings of a lofty building with magnificent roofs, but all we have is the crypt, or basement of the church. Nevertheless, the crypt is a beautiful piece of architecture, and a prelude to Gaudi's masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia.
We arrived as mass was ending. I was impressed to see how lively the town was. Tabula rasa towns like this often end up deserted. But over a century after the Guell Colony's construction, and long after the factory has ceased production, the town has a life of its own.
Gaudi's signature invention was the catenary arch. In order to find the most efficient structural shapes, he built upside-down models out of chains and weights. The form assumed by the suspended chains can be flipped and constructed of stone. Just as the inverted chain model acts in pure tension, the stone columns and arches act in pure compression, which ensures minimal amount of material to achieve the desired space. As seen below, the columns in the church are not vertical as in typical construction, but rather angled toward the loads.
Much like the cathedrals of old, for Gaudi, design was an ever-evolving process. He would continue producing new drawings as buildings were being built. And perhaps a building that can't continuously change is a dead building.