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Having seen where Gaudi was inspired.
I headed to Barcelona to get a closer look at his most famous work, la Sagrada Familia.
140 years after construction started.
It's still not finished.
Gaudi must have known it was going to take forever.
He had a school built on the grounds for the workers kids.
Today, the workers look quite different than they did years ago.
Instead of chisels and hammers, La Sagrada Familia's team now works in a design lab with
state of the art technology.
This is the remaining or the continuation, the artistic workshop that worked in the old times.
So you have moved from, you see it all in here, clay, sculpture.
Oh yeah.
You're working in plaster.
We make molds of Silicon molds and all this, but we have added the new technologies of
3D printers.
That's amazing.
I love it.
It's old but new, it's all here in one room.
We are combinating because this kind of printers.
Okay.
Use a material which very similar to plaster.
This one is from the 3D printers.
That's from a 3D printer.
Yeah.
Holy cow.
The process begins in the technical office with the architects and they make the designs
of the, obviously they have the knowledge to have the building of the history of the
documents they need.
They send an STL file, an STL file is a file translated to the language of the machine,
the 3D language.
It works like a printer.
Yeah.
Just makes a sheet of powder and then another one droves and droves and then the machine
can calculate how many sheets.
And you come back in the morning,
yeah, it's there.
Exactly!
It's there but you have to extract.
These pieces are very creative and they they look new like, like someone just designed it.
Yeah.
But okay.
It was so long ago.
Yeah.
For example, this one is a design from Gaudi.
Is that one thing that's strange that you can design work here, step outside and go
see it as it's, so your back and forth.
Well, thank you so much for giving me just a glimpse of what you are doing down here
in this workshop.
It is absolutely amazing.
After seeing how the work gets done in miniature,
I was excited to get a look at the structure itself.
I would like to show you this facade nativity facade, which is the only facade Gaudi saw finished.
Yeah.
Take a look at the facade.
You can see nature all around.
Gaudi always said that God created nature, so when he was building buildings, he wanted
imitate God's creation, he wanted to immitiate nature.
Which speaks to the organic.
To your point of he loved nature.
Being outside.
Did a lot of traveling on horseback I heard.
He would take even inspiration from caves, and I feel like, I see so much of that.
Well, I got to admit the sun's out.
I think I'm anxious to go see all that stained glass and color in there.
Let's go check it out.
Let's get inside, Nate.
As you can see, the first thing that catches your attention when you're getting inside
Sagrada Familia is the amount of natural light from outside.
It looked at dark and a bizzare church, like a dark cave.
Yeah, those dark bell towers and that dark facade.
Yeah.
So you did not expect to see this amount of natural light on these colors inside Sagrada Familia.
Take a look at the walls.
Walls do not support any weight.
The weight of the roof, the weight of the bell towers is supported by the columns, not
on the walls.
So, Gaudi managed to open hundreds of windows and that created, those windows with colored
stained glass decoration to allow the natural light in, but at the same time to change the
color of the natural light and get inside Sagrada Familia.
This is an organic church.
The color's going through the windows.
They paint the columns, the roof depending on the location of the sun, the appearance
of interior Sagrada Familia changes.
From here, we have a beautiful view of the central naieve of Sagrada Familia.
Over here we can see cool colors, blue and green, that side of the church faces East.
Okay.
It gets morning light.
Gaudi always said the morning light is a cool light, so he wanted cool colors decorating
that side of the church.
Interesting.
That side of the church you can see warm colors, orange, yellow, and red.
Yeah, it faces West.
It got dark and the light, which Gaudi always said was a warm light.
I think what's great is you get the white light up here and it comes straight down the
middle and then it's color on both sides.
Yeah, it's incredible.
This building is alive!
Oh yeah!
It feels like a kaleidoscope, I mean, you got the blues right now, oranges in the afternoon.
It's just, Oh, it's so much to take in.
Yeah.
It makes you speechless.
If you're not speachless, I don't think you're taking it in.
The roof was not built until 2010 before 2010, this was an open courtyard.
You could see the sky.
You could see the clouds from here.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Take a look at the columns.
Gaudi wanted the interior of Sagrada Familia to look like a forest and every column is
a trunk of a tree.
If you follow the trunk of the tree, you'll see the nut of the tree, the branches emerging
from the nuts and the leaves covering the church.
I mean, you look at that and you would think somebody designed this, what, 10 years ago!
I mean he was so far ahead of time, way ahead of his time.
Get a real sense because we can get up just even a little higher of the symmetry.
Just coming down with a massive tree like columns.
Man this is beautiful.
We then headed up to the towers in an elevator installed specifically for the Pope to get
a bird's eye view of the construction.
Oh wow.
Look at this view.
There will be four bell towers around Jesus bell tower that they dedicated to the four
evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
So the bell towers here are what are going to be way taller on the ones you see here.
They're going to be almost twice the height of the ones you see here.
That is incredible.
Let's walk the passion facades.
As you will see, passion facade is totally different from nativity facade.
Every single one of their faces.
The lines are just so harsh on the face.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's very dynamic.
That Cubist facade probably was inspired by the Cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso.
I was to say it's got cubism written all over it.
There was a bit controversial decision to choose that sculptor.
Still nowadays, there are a lot of people in Barcelona that say that they don't like it,
they say it's too modern.
Too modern, interesting.
Sagrada Familia is a 20th century, and a 21st century church.
I like this facade and I think this facade balances very well with nativity facade.
I would agree.
There's so much creativity happening in Spain in the past and you just showed me even just
some of the influences from Picasso.
I mean, where do you think all that comes from?
What do you think about that?
Spain, It's a crisscross of different civilizations, cultures, religions.
The Romans came to Spain, second century before Christ.
Then the Mores came to Spain, the Visigoths, the Jews.
Creativity comes from this crisscross melting pot of religions, civilizations and cultures
in a small area.
When you think about Spain, 20th century, we have Pablo Picasso.
We have Joan Miro, we have Antoni Gaudi.
We have Pablo Casals, Barcelona.
I will say it's a great place for art.
Yeah.
It's a criss cross between culture,
this beautiful Mediterranean sun.
Location only a hundred miles South of French border.
A big port.
Melting pot of creativity.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
I love how the basilica bringing it literally all together in many ways.
Wow.
Thanks for the tour.
It was amazing.
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