The indignity of Gaudí Lego

When asked why his masterpiece, the Sagrada Família church in Barcelona, was taking so long to complete, the architect Antoni Gaudí is said to have replied, “my client can wait”. That client, of course, was God. Today, on the hundredth anniversary of Gaudí’s death — and more than 140 years after the first stone of the immense church was laid — the wait is finally over. Numerous successors have worked to bring the building to completion, with its wealth of ornament, colour and strange, mesmerising forms. Now Pope Leo XIV will bless Gaudí’s greatest creation.

Yet this milestone comes with a bitter note. It is an achievement to have finished Gaudí’s great church, but we surely could not come up with anything like this today. It is simultaneously a work of soaring artistic ambition and a monument to the powers of mystical inspiration, neither of which seem very abundant in our banal and unimaginative culture. Commenting on the challenge that Gaudí poses to the blandness of modern architecture, the designer Thomas Heatherwick said that his own plan to put a “slight curve” along the top of a window caused a colleague to remark, “Wow, you’re brave”. The Sagrada Família is the antithesis to comfortable mediocrity, to the fleeting trend, and to algorithmic thinking. In November, Lego will release a 12,000-piece model of the church, its largest ever set. This is a charming tribute in its own way, but together with the rising numbers of “Afols” — adult fans of Lego — it makes for an unfortunate symbol of the meagreness of our cultural aspirations by comparison with those of the original.

What inspired the Sagrada Família, and what animates its every detail, is the intense spiritual devotion of its designer: to the Catholic faith, to the project of Catalan nationalism, and to the vocation of architecture. In the panoply of houses, churches, parks, and pavilions that Gaudí designed, these convictions provide a framework for an inexhaustible individuality. There are living artists of passion and profundity, but to behold Gaudí’s creations at large in Barcelona is to realise the extent to which we have cordoned-off genuine artistic and spiritual expression from the daily round of life, much as we confine sickness to hospitals.

‘An unfortunate symbol of the meagreness of our cultural aspirations.’ (Lego store)

During the Sixties, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur described the ambivalent effects of what he called “the phenomenon of universalisation”. For all that the world has benefited from the spread of science, technology, and modern forms of governance and commerce, the cost has been a “subtle destruction” of the “creative nucleus of great civilisations and great cultures”. Throughout the world, Ricoeur observed, “one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda”, such that “it seems as if mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level”. The implied contrast is between cultures of the past, which had depth and distinctiveness, and those of a homogenous modernity; but the tantalising prospect manifest in Gaudí is of a civilisation that is both modern and rich in beauty and myth.

The irony of Gaudí’s legacy is that his genius is exalted by a world he would have abhorred. He was, at least from the midpoint of his life, every bit the otherworldly eccentric that one hopes a great artist to be: deeply conservative in his views (though defiant against the rule of Catalonia from Madrid), exuberantly original in his work, stubborn and fanatical in his temperament. He became so obsessed with self-denial and mortification that his physical comforts amounted to, as one biographer puts it, “sleeping in a cot with the windows open and eating nuts and lettuce dipped in milk”. During Lent in 1894, in the midst of a spiritual crisis, he fasted almost to death. When he was fatally injured by a tram in 1926, his bedraggled appearance led to him being mistaken for a tramp and taken to a pauper’s hospital. He died there after refusing to be transferred to a private clinic.

Yet Gaudí’s buildings, reduced like Nefertiti or the Mona Lisa to the status of t-shirt and keyring-fodder, have helped to turn the city he saw as the sacred heart of the Catalan nation into a tourist trap. The Sagrada Família, initially funded by the donations of the devout, was brought to completion with the revenues of the tourist industry.

Gaudí’s popularity shows that there is no shortage of people capable of appreciating great art; but that appreciation takes place within a culture of mass consumption which struggles to support creative expression of such richness and nonconformity. However deeply we feel the power of his work, as soon as we turn away we are back in a cultural universe centred on TikTok. Mark Burry, an architect who has been central to the completion of the Sagrada Família, has argued…