The light is as beautiful as the building. The primary colors blend like watercolors. As I look closer I see shapes that look like a bird and a fish. I don't know if the resemblance is intentional or not.
But the stained glass is not yet finished and where the sunlight touches unaltered there is an apparent coldness in the stone. I can't wait till it is completed. I will definitely have to come back to see this again in a few decades.
At the center Jesus hangs suspended under a golden parachute adorned with lights and grapes. He seems small compared to the hugeness of the space.
I walk although the cathedral and exit opposite where I came in to see the facade that surrounds the east entrance. It is scenes of the Nativity. The carvings here are very different from the other side. The stone is detailed and ornate. Four identical towers rise up behind each facade. I purchased the extra ticket to go up in the ones on the nativity side. An circular elevator in the far right column takes me up high above Barcelona. I take on a beautiful view of the city as I cross to the second tower, over a beige to the third then down the tight spiral staircase of the fourth.
In one side of the basement there is a museum filled with models and plans. There is a very cool inverted model where he ties weights onto wires to prove the structural integrity of the towers and arches. He did it with out complex math equations or computer simulations. He just turned the geometry upside down and let gravity do the work. Amazing!
After Gaudi died (he is buried in the church) a fire destroyed a lot of the his models and drawings. So the architects today are having to piece fragments together and make interpretations. Some say it is blasphemy tampering with Gaudi's work others say Gaudi knew he would never live to see it finished and knowingly left it to future artists to finish. Either way it is only 60% completed.
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