this is the Basilica de las sagada Familia or the Church of the Holy Family a UNESCO world heritage
site and Flagship creation of world famous catalon architect Anton gy and after 140 years it's nearly
completed but I'm not here as just another tourist I'm here to crack the code of G's
genius and figure out the Mysteries hidden in the stone and stained glass why did gouty Design This
mesmerizing Monument the way he did and why has it taken so long to complete I promise you the answer
will turn your head upside down let's figure this out together
I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci
this video is sponsored by Narwal
it's June 7th 1926 and a ragged old man staggers along a busy Barcelona Street suddenly a discordant clang pierces the air a tram its Bell silent due to
some recent repairs Bears down on him in a Flash time seemed to warp did he see the tram did he
hear its ominous approach no the man was lost in The Labyrinth and geometry of his own mind
while he was counting the beads in his Rosary deep in prayer his unemp appearance and having
no identification on him LED passer by to assume he was a beggar no one paid much attention to him
except for a news boy who started yelling for help the man woke up in a hospital bed surrounded by
unfamiliar faces he was taken to the hospital de la Santa crew a public Hospital known for treating
the less fortunate his first thoughts were not of his health but of the project he had devoted the
last 40 Years of his life to because of the delays in getting proper medical treatment the man died 3
days later on June 10th 1926 the man of the story is none other than Antony gy the renowned calian
architect responsible for Designing one of the most iconic buildings in the religious world the
sagata Familia his untimely death is just one of the many reasons why the most amazing church ever
designed was delayed and remains unfinished over 140 years later but why did gudy dedicate most
of his life to the creation of this seemingly unattainable dream and why does it look like
this to answer that first question I asked myself who commissioned the temple and why did they hire
gouty in the first place my research led me to a book seller named babella babella was a successful
book seller and printer in Barcelona who founded the association of devotees of St Joseph aka the
josephites this was a Pious society that promoted the values of the Christian family it was in the
late 1860s when babella took a trip to Rome and visited the Basilica of St Peter and the
sanctuary of Loretto he was amazed by the the beauty and Majesty of these sacred places and
decided to dedicate his fortune and his life to replicating this Majesty in his hometown
so in 1881 he bought this plot of land in The aample District in Barcelona and got to work so
at first I was thinking this guy must have been a millionaire to buy such Prime real estate here in
Barcelona but it turns out back in 1881 this was mostly farmland and quite cheap most of Barcelona
was built around this Cathedral and it's hard to imagine today thinking of this bustling Metropolis
as just Farmland but that's what it was until this Cathedral went in babella first hired a
young architect named Francisco de Paulo de Valar who had designed several churches and chapels in
Catalonia he asked him to design a temple in the gothic style similar to the sanctuary of
Loretta that would promote a focus on family and thus was eventually named the Basilica DEA
sag Familia which is Spanish for the Church of the Holy Family referring to Jesus Christ
the Virgin Mary and her husband Joseph constru ruction began on March 19th 1882 but babella
wasn't satisfied with dea's design he felt that the project lacked something it lacked Grandeur
these disagreements led to deala resigning and a professor of architecture and a friend of babella
John Mark Terell recommended a young and talented student of his and his name was Anton gy we'll get
back to Professor Mark Terrell before the end of the video because he is Central to why Gotti
designed this Agata Familia the way he did you won't want to miss that there's something magical
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babella know that in G's hands this would become one of the most ambitious construction projects of
all time and there's no way he could have known I mean at the time G was in his 20s had barely
any experience at all and had only Built a gazebo and designed a couple of lamp posts there's no no
way to overstate the grandiosity of the sagata Familia it's a true architectural engineering
and storytelling Masterpiece it's also one of the largest religious buildings in the world
but we'll get back to that here in a minute gouty went above and beyond bab Bella's vision and made
it his own the structures floor plan is actually a typical Latin cross layout which is common for
many Catholic churches so it has a central Nave that's the long part right here a transcept which
is the rectangle that cuts across the central Nave to make the shape of the CR cross and an absy
which is the back part of the church you see here but one of the things that caught my attention is
that he designed the church to have three facades I'd never heard of a church having more than one
I started looking at other churches to see if I found something similar and nothing most Catholic
churches only had one facade in the front of the central Nave that's where you normally
go in through they may have doors on the sides but the sides are usually flat and plain only
the front is heavily embellished so why did he do that to tell a story the story of the Holy Family
and Jesus's life gouty dedicated the Nativity facade to the birth of baby Jesus and his early
life this is the Nativity facade you can see it's adorned with imagery of the wise men Jesus Mary
and Joseph and other birth of Jesus Christmas celebrations but the big thing is you can just
tell the difference in age of this Cathedral this facade was built way earlier as you can tell and
as you look over to there the glory facade which will go to here in a second which is built a lot
newer that's one of the funny things that happens when you build a church over 160 years the passion
facad is dedicated to his crucifixion and death and the glory facade the most grandiose of all and
which will be the main entrance to the temple is dedicated to his glory and Resurrection one thing
that kept bugging me was how many towers does this church have and why so many I mean from far away
it kind of looks like a giant Chandelier full of half molten candles the sarda Familia will have a
total of 18 Towers 18 plus a bunch of other minor spires in different shapes and sizes each of the
three facades will have four bell towers for a total of 12 dedicated to each of the 12 apostles
right where the central Nave meets the transcept there will be a square of four larger and taller
Towers dedicated to the four evangelists Matthew Barnabas Jude and Simon one in the back over the
abses dedicated to the Virgin Mary the main tower will be right in the middle of the four evangelist
Towers and will be dedicated to Jesus Christ That central tower will be the tallest of the tall when
you look at this building up close and personal you realize how none of the pictures and videos
You See online really do it justice God's unique Gothic naturalism style really pops out at you
it's a mixture of gargoyles plants trees animals and religious figures that look kind of grotesque
from far away but kind of beautiful up close but if you thought the outside was crazy the inside is
where all the crazy engineering goes on you won't find many many statues or scriptures inside the
srat Familia only four there's one on each end of the cross that makes up the floor plan one of the
Virgin Mary and the side of the passion facade one of St Joseph Jesus's dad on the Nativity
side Jesus himself right up on top of the Altar and finally behind the glory facade you'll find
the patron saint of Catalonia St George the rest is a whole lot of space The Columns many
columns of different shapes sizes and colors GTI envisioned a structure that resembled a forest
following the Gothic naturalism style the pillars have different colors because they're built of
different construction materials depending on the weight they have to support thick Columns
of red perer a volcanic rock are the strongest and hold most of the weight of the massive
Towers on top smaller dark columns are made of Bassel and the white columns that project the
exterior light are made of granite now I just said that the inside is where the engineering
magic happens but you may be wondering why is that here's why I visited notredam cathedral in
Paris once before the last fire there's a a huge difference between both structures even though
they're both Gothic notice something different between this and this the roofs and towers of
s Familia don't have buttresses to support the weight imagine you have a wall trying to hold
up a heavy roof the wall might bend or even buckle and break under the pressure buttresses are thick
sturdy structures that lean against the wall at an angle pushing back against the roof's weight
preventing the wall from bending and collapsing nram Cathedral is famous for its magn magificent
flying buttresses and it's considered a prime example of Gothic engineering so how the hell
did GTI design such a huge structure with huge vaed ceilings without buttresses and make it all
so it wouldn't collapse how did he even know that it wouldn't collapse that's where his Professor
Joan Martell comes into the picture Martell Tau gouty a revolutionary engineering and construction
technique called graphic Statics this is a common technique used today to calculate structures and
make them stable but requires heavy mathematical calculations especially for complex structures
and let's face it there's nothing as complex as this building batti didn't have a computer
and he famously Left Behind no documentation with structural calculations what he did leave behind
were models many of them at first I figured no big deal that's got to be really common
for any architect then I saw this photo I'm sure it doesn't escape you that this church is upside
down and that's because these aren't your typical architectural models these are called hanging
chain models and gudi became famous for them this is why most people consider g a verifiable genius
let me explain why these models are like 3D versions of graphical Statics allowing him to
visualize and test different structural Solutions without going through all the complex math which
is brilliant when they're hanging upside down the entire structure is perfectly balanced and all
the columns arches and ceilings are all at their equilibrium positions and shapes if you want the
structure to support weight you just hang a piece of weight from the chain and it'll stretch into
the perfect shape for that particular load then when you flip it around you're flipping the sense
in which the weight pulls on the structure from pulling to compression but everything still points
along the same direction so everything is still in Optimum equilibrium but that's not all these
hanging models are the reason why sagata Familia looks so weird and organic all the shapes of the
Ved ceilings and the columns are modeled after the way these chains hand while being pulled down by
gravity that's why gouty was able to design using uncommon shapes like hyperboloids parabas and
Canary Curves in the early 1900s that's how he was able to design columns that resemble tall trees
that Branch out only at the top when reaching the ceiling okay that sounds good in theory but
how on Earth was he expected to then build this Behemoth and that's where the troubles began I
get goosebumps from imagining what deciding to build something like this would have felt like
back in 188 too it's a testament to both gy and bab Bella's faith that they decided to go for
it from everything I've read gudy always knew he wouldn't see the church finished in his lifetime
even if he lived to be a 100 so did babella and it's no wonder why what do you guys think did gudy
make a design hoping that sometime in the future someone would be able to figure all out and build
it or did he know something everyone else at the time didn't and while you're mulling that over
don't forget to go down there hit that like button if you're having fun with this video subscribe and
hit the Bell icon you don't miss our future videos it goes a long way to helping us make more content
like this when gudy died in 1926 only the Nativity facade had been started and had taken shape it
would only be finished 4 years later but at least gudy himself oversaw most of its construction the
construction has been going on and off for the past 141 years for context the Great Pyramid of
Giza only took 20 to 27 years to complete so the sagata Familia has so far taken six times as long
long but in the grand scheme of things while this has been the longest ongoing construction project
today it's by no means the longest in history notron for example took 182 years to complete
but that was back in the 12th century what's amazing to me is that sagrat Familia is taking
so long despite today's more Advanced Construction techniques which we'll get back to in a minute so
I asked myself why haven't they finished sagata Familia yet and how much longer is it going to
take the first major obstacle was Gotti's death this immediately halted construction for nearly
2 years while the architect studio grappled with the loss and the future of the project G's plans
and models were incomplete and his unique design approach posed unique challenges for the rest of
his successors Dominic suanes G's assistant eventually took the lead along with other
Architects like Francis deala noet and Joseph Maria jul but in 1939 disaster struck again the
Spanish Civil War broke out and the sagata Familia was attacked by anarchists the construction was
halted in 1939 9 Builders had to perform massive Restorations and they were hit with everything
from recessions in the Spanish economy to shifting priorities that slowed the eventual progress
but things changed in 1979 when another young architect a 22-year-old graduate student from New
Zealand called Mark bur joined the program he was the first to use computers to model and calculate
the structural elements of the incredibly complex passion facade he was the one who introduced
cuttingedge CNC milling machines which were robots that could carve Stone 24/7 we're talking 1988 so
this was groundbreaking Tech at the time thanks to CNC milling Machines working day and night the
construction team could make one column every 166 days that's half a year working 247 fast forward a
couple of decades later and the church finally had its roof and could hold religious masses
the new construction team has 2026 as a goal to finish the basic structure this would be awesome
since it marks the 100th anniversary of gti's death and would Mark 144 years of construction
which is a dozen dozen years or a gross in Hobbit counting but there's still One Challenge on the
horizon it took me a while to get a good grasp of the shapes and orientations of the sagata
Familia but then something hit me and it isn't immediately obvious because of how amazing it
is but this entrance here is only one of the two lateral entrances to the church the main entrance
the glory facade behind me still hasn't been built and there's something really disappointing
about that because as you can see here this is going to have to require that we demolish some
residential buildings to complete and as you can imagine the locals aren't thrilled about that but
this here would probably have to all get bought out and demolished to complete this Glory facade
apparently according to G's original designs there was a massive staircase in the front of the church
um and that would totally make sense right but most of those sketches and plans were lost
during the Spanish Civil War and so the government didn't see a problem with granting permission for
residential complexes to be built in this region but as they started to reach that eventuality of
building this thing and completing it this will become the most contentious and controversial
point of the story of sagata Familia without the frontal staircase the glory facade will lose most
of shine and well Glory but to build it they'd have to displace around 3,000 people currently
living in that region I mean imagine if you were told hey buy this commercial or residential real
estate it'll Overlook the sagata Familia and you invested your life savings into it only to
then later be told actually we're have to tear all that down and reclaim that land It's just
tough for all parties involved I've talked some of the locals around and there's definitely a point
of contention this yes is the pride of Spain and Barcelona but it's also this complicated
eminent domain problem as well but ultimately sound off in the comments below if you have the
right answer maybe somebody in Barcelona will read these comments and figure this all out all right
that is a look at the hidden engineering Marvel that is Las Familia you like that video don't
forget to hit that like button and subscribe for future videos and we'll catch you guys next week
you