Yesterday, the great unfinished Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, was officially consecrated when the Pope visited and delivered mass.
The visit opened another front in the Pope’s battle against the ‘aggressive atheism’ which, the Church argues, has left a spiritual void at the heart of the modern west. It is also hoped the visit will fast track the beatification of ‘God’s Architect’ Antoni Gaudi, the troubled genius behind La Sagrada Familia, to whom several miracles are attributed.
There is no doubting that Gaudi was a man of great faith, and the church is a heavily garlanded monument to it, but why has the Pope chosen now to Basilicise the church?
Gaudi’s architecture, in concurrence with the art of the modernism movement in general, has at its core a subtle fear of modernity. An unease with the creeping influence of an economic model that, when Gaudi was at the height of his powers, was turning ancient, independent Catalonia, into an industrial outpost of the Spanish state. It was this brave new world that eventually killed Gaudi, when he was run down by a tram.
In La Sagrada Familia we see a protest against this industrial modernity rendered in stone. Fiercely natural shapes, internal as opposed to linear geometries, animate the building lending it an air of unreality. These natural forms however don’t present a clear preference for nature over society. Gaudi’s vision of nature has an alien quality. It is a nature, not of vernacular styles, but of the hive and the insect.
There is a horror hidden in this architecture, an approximation of nature’s alien forms. It is nature imagined against at a time of increasing urbanisation when people and the resources of the countryside were being increasingly pulled into the cities and the natural rhythms of the seasons were being replaced by the strict ticking of the mechanical clock. It is nature, not of the wild sea or noble steed, but the automaton society of insect colonies.
As argued by Juan Antonio Ramirez in The Beehive Metaphor, architects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were heavily influenced by the perfection and balance perceived to lurk in the design of Beehives.
Gaudi’s work is a beautiful manifestation of this instinct but when it re-emerged in the 20th century, through the extreme functionality of Le Corbusier, it left an architectural legacy often far less benevolent or majestic that that of La Sagrada Familia.
The references to alien, insect nature seen in Gaudi’s work strike a chord deep in the human subconscious and his strange forms have haunted the popular imagination ever since. In Pan’s Labyrinth for example, Gaudiesque spaces become the home to monsters as fantastical as the architecture itself and in Metamorphosis, Kafka articulates perfectly the fear that the human spirit is being subsumed to an ever more hive like society.
Likewise James Cameron’s Aliens directly addresses the fear of the hive. In the film the aliens have no individual identity; each being merely a part of the whole – mindless and murderous subjects of the queen, devoid of will. And the landscape they inhabit? An indistinct maze of non linear, organic geometries, heavily reminiscent La Sagrada Familia.
In Gaudi’s architecture we see modernity’s analogy of nature, as machine bent to the will of man and his industry, extended to dominate human life also. This concern is reflected in the type of Catholicism that Gaudi chose to embrace.
Gaudi’s Catholicism was one of rich imagery and archetypes rooted firmly in the mystic tradition. Making La Sagrada Familia a basilica is therefore a moment of enormous symbolism. The rash of modernist Catholic churches, best exemplified by Liverpool’s Catholic cathedral, tell of an age when the church was at one with the shifting tides of modernity.
Today though, in a world left battered by the collapse of Western economic and political orthodoxy and facing the moral and physical questions posed by ecological imbalance, the church is articulating itself anew, calling on society to find a motive other than the economic. La Sagrada Familia then, a powerful dialogue between society and nature, is a good place to start
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