TONGBAS
AND MOMOS

An earthly spire rises above the heart of Barcelona. She doesn’t belong – her wild curves are all style and fury, the force of her personality warping the regular, sharp geometry of her city’s blocks as they stretch in straight bright lines from the hills to the sea. There’s nothing like the Sagrada Familia, the Holy Family - not in Barcelona, not on earth. She is the madness of her father, a fevered dream born as a tower of stone. Her birth, her beauty, is the story of her creator, Antoni Gaudí.

Gaudi spent his youth riding around on a donkey in the backyard of his parents farm. As Young Gaudi annoyed snails and unwound ferns and chased geckos up trees, he was fascinated by the geometric patterns found in nature. All those spirals and golden ratios and curves, Gaudi loved those infernal things. In the interior of the Sagrada Familia, pillars twirl and arch into stone forest canopies. The afternoon sun slips in through the stained windows, and the stone forest borrows the last light of day and blooms into spring. How did one man think of all this? 

Hipster Gaudi was too insane for mainstream architecture, but lucky for him, he was born during Barcelona’s golden age. Barcelona was one of the first Spanish cities to embrace industrialisation and many of her citizens got loaded with sweet cash to burn, and so if you were a 19th century plot of land in Barcelona, a Catalan tycoon would most likely want to hire some hipster architect to design some outlandish building on you that in some metaphorical way will represent his…. Anyway, Gaudi was the el maestro of crazies - he designed a grand piano room just big enough to fit the piano and nothing else, bedrooms that were inspired by contours of grass, but which were so narrow that no one could even get in…and he sold the grand piano when the owner rejected the grand piano room, and billed the owner all the same.

And so it went. As time went on, he retreated deeper into his already formidable weirdness. He gave up meat, became celibate, and his soul went deeper into his faith. And he was then contracted for the one project that will come to define not just him, but Barcelona.

Gaudi was contracted to build a small church, but once again Gaudi decided that fucks were out of stock in Antoni town, and what Antoni town needed was Family. Construction Manager Gaudi decided to dedicate his entire life to the building of the Sagrada Familia. The Sagrada Familia is purely funded by donations, and when construction stopped due to lack of funds, Gaudi dumped whatever personal savings he had into it. When that ran out, he hounded the rich in Barcelona for donations, and he was such an unrelenting beggar-activist that the 1% crossed to the other side of the road when they saw G Dawg striding down the street. Some poor naive fool told Gaudi, after giving his donation and trying to be nice, that “no worry, it’s no big deal.” Big G replied him with a dose of his bitch: “then give enough such that it is a big deal.”

G’s dream for the Sagrada Familia is insane – carvings of all kinds of things, in all kinds of styles, adorn every surface, and together they are supposed to recount important events from the Bible. Gazing upon it, we build the other half of the cathedral in our mind’s eye. We crop out the metal cranes and fill in gilded towers; we squint past the scaffolding to greet organic sculptures. We etch wild and unleashed dreams onto un-hewn shores of stone. Gaudi had made the Sagrada Familia so outlandish, it has more than enough creative space to accommodate everyone’s wildest fantasies of what a building could be.

In his twilight years, G-dalf was so poor he sold his house and lived in his workshop, which was relocated to the crypt within the Sagrada Famila. He deplored “wasteful expenditure”, and this apparently included new clothes and hygiene, so in the last few years of his life he was dressed only in rags and his rampant beard. He looked so destitute that when he was going home one day, taxis refused to pick him up, mistaking the greatest architect in Barcelona for a hobo. So Old Man Gaudi had to walk home, and when he was crossing a road, a tram knocked him down. When his friends wanted to send him to the hospital, the mortally-wounded OG refused aid, declaring that his friends should spend the medical fees on the Sagrada Familia instead. When he died, all that was completed of the Sagrada Familia was a single tower of one facade.

Gaudi saw this coming – he knew this mad endeavour was going to outlast him. It was fine – as time went by, the Sagrada Familia became not so much a construction project than the living, evolving embodiment of the Catalonian struggle itself. This was his gift to Barcelona – each generation will carry on the torch. He churned out scale models, sketches, and moulds. All he could do was to put down his designs as detailed as possible, so future generations could labour on.

The Sagrada Familia is now 142 years old. Her construction is privately funded – apparently the Japanese are great admirers and donors; perhaps the struggle of Gaudi-san appealed to the principles of the Bushido code. Even today, a Japanese sculptor regularly hoists himself up into a crane and volunteers his skills, chipping away at unfinished sculptures on one of the Sagrada Familia’s facades.

After all, when in a thousand years’ time, in a blink of the cosmic eye, this building will likely be dust, and hopefully what survives, slumbering, will be the story of its birth.