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| Pau Audouard, portrait photograph of Antoni Gaudí, 1878. |
On 7 June 1926, Gaudí was struck by a tram on his way to evening confession. Dressed shabbily, carrying no identification, he was initially mistaken for a beggar and taken to a pauper’s hospital rather than receiving immediate specialist care. He died three days later, at seventy-three, and was buried in the crypt he himself had designed.
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“My client is not in a hurry.”
Antoni Gaudí, on why the church was taking so long
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At his death, only the crypt, the apse, and part of one façade were complete. Nearly a century of continued work, funded entirely by donations and ticket sales, with no government money involved, has finally brought the building to something close to its intended silhouette.
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| Sagrada Família, exterior view, present day. |
Anarchist militias burned much of the crypt and destroyed Gaudí’s studio during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, taking most of his original plans and detailed plaster models with it. Architects since have had to piece his intentions back together from surviving photographs, fragments, and the underlying geometric logic of the parts he did finish.
I used to assume “still under construction” meant a building was somehow incomplete as an experience. Walking through it, the scaffolding and cranes feel less like an interruption and more like part of the point: you are watching an act of faith still actually happening.
In February 2026, the final section of the central Tower of Jesus Christ was lifted into place, completing the exterior’s tallest point, at 172.5 meters, deliberately kept one meter shorter than Montjuïc hill, since Gaudí insisted his work should never surpass God’s own creation.
A church begun by one architect, redesigned by another who knew he’d never see it done… and finished, more or less, almost exactly a century after his funeral.
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