Nature's Divine Design
A Visit to Sagrada Familia
To me, a holy place is one of simplicity and also grandiosity, where fractals comprise the complete, detail is found down to the minutiae, and there is glory in the whole as the sum of many parts. A cathedral, a forest, a human body, a cell. There is a depth of meaning can be traced through all of it’s layers.
The Sagrada Familia, architect Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece cathedral project in Barcelona, is an immaculate representation of this divine link between nature and architecture through the use of biomimicry.
As a child, Gaudí spent a lot of time alone studying the natural world, mesmerized by the ways a living thing held itself together. As a deeply religious person, he rationalized that the “Creator” designed these natural forms to be their most effective.
Later, as an architecture student, he used these lessons to inform his design. For example, many of his designs avoid straight lines. The natural curves prove to be inherently lighter, allowing columns to carry heavier loads with smaller diameters. By accessing the organic design of bodies, plants and things that evolve, Gaudí taps into this universal language, the divine code of design that nature itself has oriented. Not just for the modernist aesthetic, but because of their intrinsic effectiveness in having been created by God and evolved to the most perfect versions of themselves.
This biomimetic architecture can be first seen clearly in Gaudí’s work on Casa Batlló, with its bone-like columns and oval shapes in its many windows and arches, or Casa Milà, with the undulating stone facade. The natural influence culminates in the Sagrada Familia, as it imitates and re-orders nature, becoming in itself a revelation of God. In his later years, Gaudí was known as “God’s architect,” able to tap into something that provided residents the opportunity to experience the beauty and harmony of nature within the city, to feel the presence of God through the building design.
The result is sublime. On approaching the cathedral, the nativity facade on the east side shows scenes of the gospels and Jesus’s early life, leafy textured stone crowds each scene, creating all together something soggy, like an old sponge used to wet the wheel for clay. The western facade shows the passion of Christ, behind bonelike columns that reach like a ribcage over the entrance. Shapes here are sharper and more austere, the pain that comes with love; the sacrifice feels explicit, embodied.
The cathedral’s towers, which are still under construction, have fruits at their peaks and are textured all around. The entirety of the exterior is full of twisted shapes and sacred stories, life and the things that lead unto death, power and pain and glory and abundance.
Walking inside, there is an immediate sense of exaltation — a feeling of being taken away, drifted into gentle woods glowing with ambient light. The tall columns stand at a tilt and branch off high above, holding a ceiling that is decorated with ellipsoid shapes from the rounded tops of columns that branch out, becoming stars at the base. In corners are spiral staircases, ascending to transcendence. The stained glass windows are full of hyperboloids, fractal-like elements that bring in rainbows of light into the curved spaces.
The animated exterior, busy with stories told in sculpture, holds within it a space that is so grand, high-reaching and powerful. If the cathedral itself is a metaphor, it is that in the infinite number of things happening at this very moment, there is a space of silence and great reflection, of being simultaneously above and within it all. This, to me, suggests that within each story, within each person or each moment, there is this immense and still space that can be held.
Instead of manipulating the laws of nature to create something that stands above nature, Gaudí uses these biomimetic elements to transcend from here on earth. It becomes an exploration of the mystery and messiness of life: to look at this moment and see what it is, to not only strive to achieve greater things, but to presently live and experience this moment, to be inside of the chaos and hold stillness.
It results in a whimsical world that is beyond rigid society and the straight buildings it produces. It feels soft, flowing, palpable, and evolving.
Through his work on Sagrada Familia, Gaudí teaches us that as natural beings, we were built as masterpieces, as divine pieces of architecture. In Gaudí’s perspective, if we are structurally perfect because we were made by the Creator, then not only are Gaudí’s buildings a mecca to this Godly sort of order, but each of our own bodies, each tree, each element of the natural world also carries this same weight of meaning. We are of a divine design.
