From the issue dated April 9, 2004
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i31/31a01401.htm
Drawing to a Close
A Spanish architect's stunning Barcelona church was left unfinished. Now a New Zealand designer is taking his vision to new heights.
By PETER MONAGHAN
Melbourne, Australia
The masterpiece of the singular Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet is the improbable Sagrada Família, a gigantic church that shimmers like an image from a dream over the center of Barcelona, Spain.
As with many of Gaudí's other works in the city, including parks, houses, and the Casa Milà apartment block, the Sagrada Família somehow harmonizes muddles of geometric brickwork, Arab-inspired skewed extrusions, and gleaming, colored ceramic tiling. It is, in fact, the pinnacle of the architect's mystical perception, trumpeting its accomplishment with 360-foot spires bursting with animal and plant carvings and capped with sculptural elaborations that resemble rocketing bishops' miters.
But the structure that some two million visitors see each year constitutes only about half of the grand plan of el gran Gaudí. When he died, in 1926 at age 74, he had built only 8 of the planned 12 spires representing the apostles. The architect had barely begun many other parts, including the colossal nave crossing that would rise an astounding 200 feet higher still. A completed portion of the Sagrada Família has long been used as a parish church, and the faithful, while awaiting completion of the main body of the building, have had to worship among builders and tourists tromping about one of the world's most curious construction sites.
Helping to finish what Gaudí could not has been the 25-year quest of the New Zealand architect Mark Burry. Today he is a professor of "innovation in spatial-information architecture" at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, in Australia. But in 1979, he was merely a scruffy graduate student at the University of Cambridge when he made his first visit to the Sagrada Família.
Mr. Burry was writing a thesis on Gaudí, whose fusion of Christian and Moorish design inspired his own aim of combining Maori and postcolonial architecture in his native New Zealand. At Cambridge, he says, where late modernism ruled, "Gaudí was dismissed in one sentence as an interesting eccentric. They said: 'Sure, he's interesting, but there was no school.'"
The maverick in Gaudí, he says, "excited me a lot."
In Barcelona he found that only desultory efforts had been made to continue Gaudí's project. That, itself, fascinated him.
What little construction was under way had been based on slim evidence of Gaudí's wishes for the project. Mr. Burry recalls that when he met two 90-year-old former colleagues of Gaudí's, "I asked where the authority to continue the building was coming from, and how it was communicated. They showed me some boxes of broken models, and said that that was the authority."
Modeling the Mind
As Mr. Burry relates his introduction to the project, he sits in front of a variety of computer illustrations and wax models of it. He says that the church's caretakers, who had worked with Gaudí, noted his interest and offered him a scholarship. He accepted it, and worked with them for a couple of months before returning to England.
After his return, Mr. Burry yearned to continue working on the Sagrada Família. "I wrote from London requesting an opportunity to return," he says. "I was staggered when they replied by express mail in the affirmative offering an open contract and a salary raise."
After running into unending lines of applicants for residency, he took to traveling to Spain on his New Zealand and British passports, alternating from one to the other every three months. "It was quite hairy," he says. "I seem to recall in those days Spain would not allow you to travel on two passports."
The church's caretakers, seeing how enthusiastically and empathetically he was entering into Gaudí's world, soon appointed him the consultant architect to the Temple Sagrada Família, charged with many aspects of its completion.
Already, Mr. Burry had begun to display the technical brilliance that has made him, today, a highly regarded designer. At the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, a state-of-the-art think tank that he directs at the Melbourne technology institute, Mr. Burry publishes widely on issues of design, construction, and their computerization. The center attracts local and international designers interested in working on rapid design and construction techniques that use advanced computer tools.
The center is inspired by the "dECOi" model, in which designers, builders, and others work together to conceive and execute building plans, in contrast to traditional construction, where architects come up with plans that tradesmen, often skeptically, execute. Its pioneer was the designer Mark Goulthorpe, who heads his own design studio in Paris, and is currently an associate professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Burry collaborates often with Mr. Goulthorpe and other high-profile modern architects such as Frank Gehry, to whom he is an adviser on design problem-solving, and he is a visiting professor of architecture at the University of Liverpool and MIT.
For the Sagrada Família, Mr. Burry has guided attempts to analyze and continue Gaudí's compositional strategies, many aspects of which Mr. Burry has had to deduce by steeping himself in Gaudí's scant remaining plans, and his obscure thought, and which Mr. Burry has transformed into ultramodern building practice.
The quality of unlikeliness in Gaudí's work makes this a difficult task. Seeking an alternative to architecture's long dependence on elements of Euclidean geometry, including the cube, the prism, and the pyramid, Gaudí drew on such natural forms as trees and bones with curved surfaces that became, in his architecture, mesmerizing shapes with dizzying names – hyperbolic paraboloids, hyperboloids, helicoids, conoids.
He also invested his design for the Sagrada Família with spiritual and perhaps ideological dimensions. Its full name, translated, is Holy Family Church of the Atonement. Gaudí, a devout Catholic, intended it, as Robert Hughes suggested in his book Barcelona (Knopf, 1992), as "an ecstatically repressive building that would atone for the sins of modernism and the excesses of democracy." Mr. Burry believes, however, that such a vision may have been less prominent in the architect's mind than it was in the wishes of the church authorities who commissioned him to design the building.
The sanctuary remained unfinished when Gaudí died, but time and history dealt the project numerous other blows, including the loss of some of the architect's own plans to finish his most ambitious work. A few years after his death, a group of anarchists, in an act that foreshadowed the Spanish Civil War, attacked the building, which was something of a monument to the old guard, and destroyed or badly damaged Gaudí's models.
Those were, in any case, few in number. The architect had nurtured many of his ideas in his imagination, then slowly, doggedly, made some of them concrete.
The continued translation of the architect's vision into reality slowed – all the more so as various new architectural styles commanded the tastes and efforts of Barcelona's architects and builders. The stonemasons chiseled away at a snail-like pace. By the late 1970s, the second transept, the Passion Facade, often delayed by controversy over how markedly plain its sculptural style was, compared with the rest of the church, was completed.
Then a large area was cleared so that work could begin on the body of the nave. During the 1980s, its walls rose to only 60 feet; most of the budget during those years was poured, invisibly, into the nave's foundations. (The Sagrada Família has been financed by donations, bequests, and entrance fees paid by visitors. No local or national funding has been used.)
Citizens of Barcelona and observers of the art world saw little progress in the construction. And the skeptics were baying. Mr. Hughes, for example, damned additions as "a huge simulacrum, an inert copy of a nonexistent original."
But other architecture critics said Gaudí knew that the Sagrada Família was a work of generations, and that later architects would employ new techniques to finish the construction, which had begun way back in 1883.
Flying to a Solution
Nearly a century later, Mr. Burry entered the picture.
At first he employed traditional means to unravel and reconstruct Gaudí's vision, including drawing new plans by hand. But he ultimately decided that new priorities and techniques would have to be found to ensure speedier progress.
For instance, when the project's directors came to him at the end of the 1980s, proposing that aboveground work press ahead, "I told them I wasn't keen on continuing to work in the same way," he says.
He would, instead, bring Gaudí into the era of computer-aided design, developing a dramatically new variety of techniques.
Conventional architectural software was not up to handling the kinds of intersecting, doubly curved surfaces that Gaudí had pervasively envisaged – and it still is not. So, Mr. Burry made the leap to using, for the first time in architecture, then-emerging aeronautical software. "It could deal with spatial issues in a lot more sophisticated way," he says.
Still, he adds, "there was nothing in the software packaging driving this. We had to be innovative." The builders did, too, he says, and "we pulled each other along."
Mr. Burry creates his computer models from fragments of Gaudí's original models. These were rare constructions. Gaudí used a system now called polyfunicular modeling. With shot weights and string, he built an upside-down model, in which tension on strings mimicked, inversely, the intricate web of forces of compression that the structure would be under. That permitted him to develop a startling, unprecedented plan: to pile up millions of tons of masonry without buttresses. In doing so, he resolved a shortcoming in Gothic design.
Behind Mr. Burry, in his office, is a small, modern-day version of one of the models that Gaudí built from plaster. It is made of wax – a printer takes computer designs and, over many hours of ejecting tiny droplets of wax, translates them into three-dimensional models. Mr. Burry can transmit his computer designs to his collaborators in Barcelona, who use the same kind of printer to create equivalent, intricately detailed models.
As Mr. Burry explains some of the considerations that go into his plans, the level of sophistication rapidly rises. From the rigorous rationality of his explanation, however, one gathers that he, at least, is in full control of the whole process.
In fact, Mr. Burry remarks, Gaudí's conception is, in some respects, unexpectedly easy to build. "Every surface you see here is warped, but they're all surfaces made from straight lines," he says. One can generate intricate shapes such as circular and elliptical hyperboloids simply by, respectively, sweeping a hyperbola or an inclined straight line about a central axis or an elliptical path.
"Imagine that you're holding a knitting needle, like this," he begins. Inclining one end of it up from the table, he demonstrates how moving the lower end of the needle while holding the upper end steady creates such shapes.
When his visitor begins to look puzzled, he says: "With the Sagrada Família we're actually trying to make a piece of geography; that's the best way I can explain it."
The software creates virtual models that can accommodate modifications by quickly updating the whole, interconnected model – without requiring time-consuming and costly recalculation and redrafting that formerly would have been done by designers and draftsmen.
In this "parametric" approach, Mr. Burry and his small team in Melbourne, including his architect wife, Jane Burry, can control planning of the whole assembly even though they may configure large sections of building plans only loosely, leaving precise measurements until later in the planning and construction process. Granite and artificial-stone blocks can be shaped off-site, taking into consideration crane operations and the like, and then rapidly placed in Barcelona, without additional modification. Construction of lower portions of elements of the building can even begin before upper portions are fully resolved.
The computer-aided designs have proven to be highly accurate, and they are easily communicated, via electronic mail, directly to the on-site technical office in Barcelona. The result has been a greatly accelerated pace of construction.
Pulling Together
In so vast a project, keeping track of what's what requires a considerable feat of memory. As Mr. Burry's team has demurely put it on the project's own Web site (http://www.sial.rmit.edu.au), with respect to just one large, ornate window: "The use of memory became a significant issue in the cumulative effect of these operations, working from the large scale geometry to the decorative detail and rebate for the window."
But still, says Mr. Burry, the project breaks down into smaller tasks that profit from the attention of many kinds of workers, from architects to stonemasons. In modern design, he says, the "guild secrets" of specialized trades should give way to a realization that "creativity as an intellectual enterprise is common to everything."
The aims of that approach, he says, are akin to those Gaudí had. Although he was the guiding light of his projects, all his endeavors required cooperation and communication: "It's not that all people need to be illuminated," Mr. Burry says. Gaudí inevitably relied on skilled collaborators – Mr. Burry is most impressed by Josep Maria Jujol, who, along with other less-studied colleagues of Gaudí, is the subject of ongoing historical research.
"We're trying to challenge the sole authorship model," Mr. Burry says. Still, today, he observes, architecture journals continue to personify projects, "but that's bizarre for buildings." Yes, he admits, "you risk everyone being a master of nothing, but we're trying to encourage people to fulfill their predilections." In part, he says, that means not just moving beyond what have in the past been held to be "logical disciplinary boundaries," but also moving beyond any "fixation on the digital." The architecture team aspires to "postdigital design," where the computer tools are assumed and do not direct the course of design.
In fact, claims Mr. Burry, for all the wonders of computerization, and for all its benefits to architectural challenges like the Sagrada Família, the Spatial Informational Architecture Laboratory has made the Gaudí project an umbrella over activities that are moving beyond any mere fascination with computerization.
"We've established ourselves as a place for doing postdigital design," he says. "We've assimilated the traditional within the digital, and the digital within the traditional." That is only natural, he adds, given that students coming to his laboratory now tend to be more "polymath" than his own peers were. They take computers for granted, so are able to think ahead to possibly revolutionary uses for them.
Mr. Burry has no doubt that Gaudí would have embraced the use of computers. "All we're doing is what he could do in his head," he says.
And yet, while Gaudi's accomplishment was of so vast a spectrum – technically, artistically, spiritually – that it beggars any merely technological perspectives, the architect genius "failed quite significantly in his enterprise," Mr. Burry says, unsentimentally. Relatively few of Gaudi's buildings were completed, he notes.
Barcelonans continue to joke, as they have for decades, about the Sagrada Família being finished in 10 years – from now, or from 10 years from now. But Mr. Burry is pushing on. Within four years, by the 125th anniversary of the start of construction, he plans to complete the interior of Sagrada Família's nave, to accommodate 15,000 people, and he has created plans for the four remaining spires.
Catalans clearly now have embraced the once-scruffy graduate student. Last year Mr. Burry was elevated to the highest rank that the Royal Catalan Academy of Arts bestows on nonresidents of Catalonia. And his progress gradually is bringing Catalans to believe that they may soon see the completion of the church that even Mr. Burry calls "a statement of ruinous optimism."
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
