An End in Sight for a Centuries-Old Building Project?

In recent years, ramped up efforts and state-of-the-art technology have speeded construction at Barcelona's famously unfinished Sagrada Família Church
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From Architectural Record
Josephine Minutillo

The Sagrada Família's incorporation of such complex forms lent itself to the emerging digital technology of the late 1980s, an undertaking spearheaded by Professor Burry. "Trying to draw Gaudí buildings is a very thankless task," Burry says from experience. "I have become the only person on the project to work on both analog drawings and digital modeling."

The first digital model was produced in 1989, but architectural software proved insufficient for resolving Gaudí's interweaving geometries. By the next year-and concurrently with Frank Gehry's office-Burry's team was creating models using advanced surfacing software designed for the aeronautical industry. (Today, the team of architects and engineers in Barcelona uses a combination of programs including CATIA, Rhino, and Mechanical Desktop by Autodesk, and several of Burry's Melbourne-based collaborators at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at RMIT use Gehry Technologies' Digital Project.) Used early on as a time-saver in the process of "reverse engineering," flexible modeling software later provided an opportunity to experiment iteratively, backtracking and direction-changing with relative ease, and allowed the ready assembly of libraries of parts. The Sagrada Família was also one of the first projects to experiment with rapid prototyping, but it is a combination of digital and physical models, as well as sketches, that inform design even today.

A model of the triforium was made
with sophisticated parametric design
software (top). A column's geometry
transforms as it ascends (left). Wood formwork is used in construction of
the apse skylight (below). Large steel
pieces are placed at the base of the
apse tower (bottom-left). A rendering
shows the hyperboloids of the nave's
ceiling (bottom-right).

Photos: The Sagrada Família (below);
Drawings: Mark Burry (top); Arxiu Temple Sagrada Família (left); The Sagrada Família (bottom right)

 

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Originally published in Architectural Record
Originally published in August 2009

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