A small church within the wood
Everyone knows the Sagrada Família. The Gaudí I want to tell about begins instead at Santa Coloma de Cervelló. In the unfinished church at Colònia Güell, commonly called the crypt, stone, bricks, trees and light make me look slowly. Before recognising a style, I encounter a way of building.
The inclined columns are not graphic whims. Stone and masonry perform well in compression and far less well in tension: orienting the supports means seeking a coherent path for forces. Here, resemblance to a trunk does not exhaust the column’s meaning. What matters is the relationship between what I see and what the material has to do.
Gaudí did more than teach us to build structures that look like trees. He taught us to ask how a tree grows.
Thinking through forces
The hanging model for Colònia Güell makes this research tangible. Suspended strings and small weights allowed Gaudí to study equilibrium; inverting the arrangement yielded a geometry for construction. The building remained unfinished, and its columns were also conceived in relation to an upper church that was never built. We cannot read it as though every part of the project had been realised.
For me, this is the decisive step: nature enters design as a process. A tree does not first choose its image and then find a way to support it. It grows through relationships between weight, material, light and environment. This comparison is a way of reading, not a literal equivalence between a living organism and a building. Yet it radically changes the question I put to architecture.
The 1989 photograph
During my first study stay in Barcelona I photographed a column at the Sagrada Família building site. Reinforcing bars emerged from the concrete. That image struck me because it revealed a different structural behaviour: steel can carry tension that stone struggles to withstand. Two apparently similar columns could express different relationships between geometry and material.
That sight led to a severe judgement on the completion of the Sagrada Família, which I continue to hold in cultural terms. But a building-site photograph cannot establish how an entire building was conceived. The comparison must become research: documents, models, construction phases and design decisions must be able to test my interpretation too.
A necessary clarification
Gaudí did not rule out reinforced concrete. Documentation published by the Junta Constructora refers to a 1923 lecture by Domènec Sugranyes that already described its use for columns and vaults. The contemporary building site also includes different solutions: Arup documents prestressed structural stone panels for the central towers. It would be inaccurate to reduce everything to a contrast between authentic stone and concrete foreign to Gaudí.
My criticism concerns a deeper question: what do we preserve when we continue a work? Its recognisable appearance, or the method that connects structure, material and meaning? The extraordinary capacities of contemporary engineering do not resolve that question on their own. Nor does the success of an image, by itself, prove cultural continuity with its author.
Where my account begins
I consider Colònia Güell one of the places where Gaudí’s research can be understood most intensely. Not because it is simple, or belongs to a past without technology, but because it lets me experience landscape, labour and construction together. Here architecture does more than remind me of a wood: it invites me to understand its relationships.
The two columns therefore remain the beginning of my story, not its conclusion. They have accompanied me since 1989, through my 1991 thesis and more than thirty years of study. The question remains open: when we reproduce a form, can we still recognise the reasons that generated it? This is where I want to begin telling Gaudí’s story again.