The Colònia Güell crypt, and the day Gaudí's money stopped

Go to the Colònia Güell if Gaudí is a real interest and you have four days in Barcelona. On three days, do not: it is twenty kilometres out, it is one room, and there is nothing at the end of the journey that photographs the way the famous buildings photograph.

What actually happened there

Eusebi Güell founded an industrial colony in 1890 on his farm at Can Soler de la Torre, in Santa Coloma de Cervelló — a factory with the workers’ housing built around it, which was a fashionable idea among Catalan industrialists at the time and a way of keeping a workforce out of a city that kept going on strike.

In 1898 he commissioned Gaudí to build its church. The site’s own history is blunt about the terms: Güell “did not set limits: neither in the budget, nor in the type of work nor in the deadline.” An architect with no budget ceiling, no brief and no delivery date is not a normal commission. It is closer to a grant.

Work started in 1908. The design had two naves, towers, and a dome of forty metres.

Then, in 1914, Güell’s children told Gaudí they would not go on paying. The lower nave was blessed by the Bishop of Barcelona in November 1915 and the rest was never built. That is why a building at ground level, with windows and daylight in it, is called a crypt.

The date is worth holding onto. 1914 is also the year Gaudí gave up everything else and worked on nothing but the Sagrada Família for the rest of his life. Those two facts are usually told in separate rooms.

The thing on the upper floor of the exhibition

Before he built any of it, Gaudí hung the church upside down.

The exhibition holds a reproduction of what the site calls the stereostatic model: the structure built as a hanging web of strings with small weights on them, so that gravity pulls every string into exactly the line of force it will have to carry. Photograph the result, turn the photograph over, and you have the shape of a building that stands in pure compression, with no need for the flying buttresses a Gothic church needs. The site says the technique was invented by Gaudí and was later used on the Sagrada Família.

That is the whole argument for coming here, and it is not an aesthetic one. Everywhere else in Barcelona you look at what Gaudí decided. Here you can see how he decided it.

The drawbacks, said plainly

It is one room. An hour covers the church comfortably. If you have travelled forty minutes each way for an hour, the maths only works if that hour interests you specifically.

Nothing about it is spectacular. The columns lean, the brick is rough, the windows are irregular, and none of it is trying to impress you. People who came for Casa Batlló find it plain.

The colony is a village, not a site. People live in it. The other modernista buildings — Ca l’Espinal, Ca l’Ordal, the old cooperative — are worth the walk around, and they are somebody’s front door.

It is the last thing to add and the first thing to drop. If your trip is already carrying a basilica ticket with a fixed slot, adding a half-day excursion at the other end of a train line is how the rest of the trip starts running late. The general version of that problem is in three days in Barcelona.

Who it is actually for

Anyone who has stood in front of the Sagrada Família and wondered whether the branching columns inside are a metaphor or a structure. They are a structure, and this is where that was proved, twenty kilometres away, with string.

It is also the obvious second Gaudí day for a returning visitor — the case for building a whole trip that way is in coming back to Barcelona a second time — and it belongs on the same shortlist as Casa Vicens, which is the other end of his career and the other building where nobody is standing behind you.

The full list of what he left in this city, with the ones you can see free from the pavement marked, is in every Gaudí building in Barcelona. And the reason the basilica that came out of these experiments is still not finished is set out, as constraints rather than excuses, in why it takes this long.

If you want the reasoning without the train

The Gaudí walk covers the same ideas standing on the pavement outside the Sagrada Família, performed by an actor playing Gaudí, and it takes ninety minutes rather than half a day. It is not a substitute for the crypt and we would not pretend it is: you cannot see the hanging model from Barcelona. It is the version that fits in a trip.

The hanging model is the beginning of an argument that runs through every building he made, and it did not start here — it started in a cotton bleaching shed in Mataró in 1883. The whole chain, from the string to the 270 arches over Passeig de Gràcia, is how Gaudí’s buildings stand up, and the Mataró end of it is in Gaudí outside Barcelona.

Why an industrialist was commissioning a church for his workers at all, and what the rest of Gaudí’s religious work amounted to, is Gaudí and the Church.