The older man came quietly into the basement studio. In near darkness, his son was making the final adjustments to what looked like a huge sculpture in string…and hundreds of corks.

“I thought you’d be along soon,” the young man whispered to the ghost of his father. ‘What do you think?’

“Parabolas?” The older one smiled the words. “You’ve modelled the whole thing with gravity using strings and corks!” The senior voice wavered, filled with an emotion he had successfully passed to his son.

“God’s own curves…” The imagined words were filled with a creative reverence known to both.

Antoni Gaudi, the controversial but revered architect who, in the closing years of the nineteenth century was becoming admired and loathed in equal measure among the intellectual elites of Barcelona, found himself nodding into the gently lit darkness.

“And light,” he whispered. “Always light…”

It was to be over a century before the vision that empowered the architect’s devotion came to fruition, though the main structure would tease and frustrate the citizens of Barcelona in equal measure in its partial completeness for another hundred years before it finally rose, to finished magnificence.

This is one person’s story of a life-long fascination with the Sagrada Familia. Glimpsed as a young man on a black and white TV screen and finally visited in adulthood, though the visits revealed only achingly slow progress.

Until this year, (2025) when, finally, we were able to see this temple to divine proportion in its full magnificence.

In these posts, and through time, I hope to offer a journey of awe and delight, as one of the most beautiful buildings on Earth emerges from the inverted corks in the designer’s basement, to a glorious and unique soaring temple.

And, along the way, I will share the photos I was finally able to take of this nearly completed masterpiece.

The time-travelling whimsy is mine. The building is real…

©️Stephen Tanham 2025.