Antoni Gaudí, a century on: the architect whose basilica still outgrew him

A century after Antoni Gaudí was struck by a tram on the streets of Barcelona and died three days later, the building that consumed his life is still being raised over the city's Eixample grid. On 10 June 2026, Pope Leo XIV is due to celebrate a Mass at the Sagrada Família and bless the basilica on the centenary of its architect's death, according to a France 24 picture essay published in French and English on the broadcaster's Telegram channel at 11:51 UTC.

The visit puts the Vatican's most visible liturgical platform behind a structure that has been under construction since 1882, that Gaudí worked on from 1883 until his death in 1926, and that Spain's national tourism office has long treated as the country's single most-visited monument. The centenary is not a commemoration of a finished work. It is a reminder that the work is still in motion.

A building that outlasted its maker

Gaudí took over the Sagrada Família in 1883, at the age of 31, when the project was already a year old and had already passed through one architect. He was hit by a tram on 7 June 1926 near the intersection of Gran Via and Bailén; his clothes gave no clue to his identity, and he was initially taken in by a passer-by who assumed he was a vagrant. He died on 10 June 1926, aged 73, and was buried in the crypt of the basilica he had been working on for the last forty-three years of his life.

The building he left behind was a fraction of what he had drawn. The Nativity Façade, on the eastern elevation, was the only one he saw substantially complete. The Passion Façade and the Glory Façade were, at his death, partly or not at all built. The eighteen spires he had conceived — twelve for the apostles, four for the evangelists, one for the Virgin Mary, and a central spire for Jesus Christ that would make the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família the tallest religious building in Europe — existed mainly as plaster models and a handful of brick stubs.

A papacy on a building site

Pope Leo XIV's blessing, scheduled for 10 June 2026, lands on a basilica that has been off-and-on a construction site for longer than most nation-states have existed. The current target date for the central Tower of Jesus Christ is 2026, which the project's governing foundation has linked to the centenary of the architect's death. The engineering challenges of raising a spire of that height on the kind of load-bearing geometry Gaudí specified have been the subject of public technical briefings by the building's directors for at least a decade.

A papal visit is, in this case, not just a liturgical gesture. The Sagrada Família was conceived as an expiatory temple — built from the donations of the faithful rather than the state — and the Vatican has historically been careful about the message its presence sends at a site still under construction. Leo XIV's decision to celebrate Mass at the basilica on the centenary ties the papacy publicly to a building whose completion has, for a century, functioned as a kind of architectural Rorschach test: a sign of Catholic continuity to its defenders, a monument to exploitative labour and unfinished ambition to its critics, and a piece of very large urban infrastructure to its neighbours.

The counter-narrative: the basilica as a city problem

It is not enough to tell the story from the scaffolding. The Sagrada Família sits in a dense residential block of the Eixample quarter, and the question of how a church that draws millions of visitors a year co-exists with the people who live around it has been live in Barcelona politics for at least twenty years. The project's tax arrangements — in particular, a long-running dispute over the agreement between the basilica's foundation and Barcelona's city government on contributions and visitor levies — have been the subject of municipal court rulings and have periodically dominated Catalan regional press. The sources available to Monexus for this piece do not detail the present state of those negotiations; the dispute is, however, the obvious place where the centenary's celebratory frame runs into local politics.

There is a second, older counter-narrative. Gaudí was a devout Catholic and an arch-conservative; his patrons included some of the most powerful figures in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Catalan industrial capital. The Sagrada Família is, in this reading, the most ambitious philanthropic-religious monument that money built in Spain before the Civil War, and reading it as a purely spiritual enterprise misses who paid for it and why. Both readings are well documented in the existing scholarly literature on the building; neither cancels the other out, and a centenary that flattens the tension does the building a disservice.

The structural frame: a building as a multi-decade project

The Sagrada Família is unusual not because it is large or because it is unconventional, but because it has been under continuous, single-purpose, single-site construction for one hundred and forty-four years. Few enterprises in the modern world operate on that timescale without interruption. The technological story of the building — the move from Gaudí's plaster models to parametric computation, the substitution of modern materials for stone in some structural elements, the engineering of the spires — is in part a history of what became possible in architecture between 1882 and now.

The economic story is just as long. The basilica has been financed almost entirely from ticket sales and private donations, and the institutional machinery that runs it — the Junta Constructora del Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, the associated foundation, the workshops attached to the site — has outlived multiple Spanish republics, a civil war, a dictatorship, a transition to democracy, and a Catalan independence crisis. That institutional continuity is, arguably, as remarkable as the building itself.

Stakes: who the centenary is for

The anniversary will, in practical terms, be claimed by several parties at once. The Catholic Church will use it to underline continuity with a project that began in the late nineteenth century and is now entering its final construction phase. The Catalan and Spanish state will use it to underline a national cultural asset that draws more visitors than any other monument in the country. The Sagrada Família foundation will use it to consolidate the project's finances and reputation in the run-up to whatever the post-2026 announcement turns out to be. The residents of the Eixample will watch a busy year in their neighbourhood. And a global audience that already knows the silhouette of the building from a thousand postcards and a thousand Instagram posts will be reminded, briefly, that the silhouette is still in motion.

What remains genuinely uncertain is whether the central spire will be ready in 2026 itself; the sources available to Monexus do not confirm a completion date for the Tower of Jesus Christ, only that one has long been the foundation's stated target. The centenary is, in that sense, a clean date for the calendar but a soft one for the building site.

This obituary framed the centenary of Gaudí's death as an institutional and architectural milestone rather than a personal one, on the grounds that the man and the building are, after 144 years, no longer separable — and that a piece written on the day a pope blesses the basilica owes readers the political and economic context the cathedral sits inside, not just the biography of the architect who started it.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/france24_fr/