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<\/p>\nThe problem facing the engineers from Arup, when they were given the sort of commission engineers from Arup do not imagine they will ever get, was the crypt.<\/p>\n
When, 150 years ago, Antoni Gaud\u00ed began working on a new basilica for Barcelona, he had a soaring vision.<\/p>\n
His church, the Sagrada Familia, would have towers that rose higher than any church in history. They would do so without buttresses, supported by geometry itself. He had studied, he said, the \u201cgreat book of nature\u201d. Like vast stone trees they would grow on the Catalonian skyline.<\/p>\n
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Antoni Gaud\u00ed circa 1882<\/p>\n
APIC\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n
But there was a difficulty \u2014 a difficulty that the British engineers tasked over a decade ago with finishing his vision have had to overcome. The foundations couldn\u2019t handle it.<\/p>\n
Gaud\u00ed was a visionary architect, but he was not the first architect of the project. He had taken over from a less visionary one, Francisco de Paula del Villar. In 1883, when Villar left the job, his church design was already under construction.<\/p>\n
\u2022 I visited the Sagrada Familia tower \u2014 here\u2019s what to expect<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThere was nothing wrong with it,\u201d said Tristram Carfrae, from Arup. \u201cIt was just a neo-Gothic church.\u201d You could recognise it from a hundred similar churches. When Gaud\u00ed began though, on a new design you definitely could not recognise from a hundred similar churches, the crypt had already been started. It had not been started envisioning that it would be beneath 18 towers<\/a>, the tallest 170m high.<\/p>\n The tower under construction<\/p>\n JOAN VALLS\/URBANANDSPORT\/NURPHOTO\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n JAMES BREEDEN FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n \u201cIt didn\u2019t have the foundations to support this monstrous tower,\u201d Carfrae said.<\/p>\n So how would they make the tower directly over the crypt lighter? That was the question that he had to help answer 12 years ago when \u2014 with a cathedral still far from completion \u2014 the Sagrada Familia approached Arup. The call, he said, came \u201cout of the blue\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was unbelievable. It was one of those pinch-yourself moments. They didn\u2019t even ask us to compete with anybody else, they just knocked on our door, saying, \u2018Can you help?\u2019\u201d Carfrae said.<\/p>\n This was actually, by the standards of Sagrada Familia procurement, pretty rational. According to legend, Gaud\u00ed had himself been chosen because his future employer had had a dream in which the church was saved by a blue-eyed redhead.<\/p>\n \u2022 Barcelona plans Sagrada Familia \u2018anteroom\u2019 to ease selfie crowds<\/a><\/p>\n Gaud\u00ed hadn\u2019t really ever built anything, but when the ginger architect turned up, he fitted the bill. \u201cHe was 30 years old. It was an extraordinary decision, really,\u201d Carfrae said. \u201cBut he turned into one of the world\u2019s greatest architects<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Gaudi\u2019s own design process is itself the stuff of architectural legend. To avoid using buttresses, he needed a way to cleanly transfer forces into the ground. What he opted for was the catenary arch \u2014 the shape made by a hanging chain.<\/p>\n To model a church made of such arches, in a time before computer-aided design, he had a technique that we know was used on other commissions, although we have no direct evidence for the Sagrada Familia.<\/p>\n He hung a lot of chains. Then he added weights to represent the amount of stone. It worked like an analog computer. The whole building would be inverted \u2014 he modelled upside down in tension what would later be built the right way up in compression.<\/p>\n When Carfrae sat down with the team to explore ways to lighten the tower, he hoped he would be an equally good choice.<\/p>\n Jordi Fauli, the current chief architect, says that Gaud\u00ed\u2019s models are not a sacred text though. Gaud\u00ed clearly assumed that new approaches would be developed. \u201cHe knew there were possibilities to build better. He knew new technologies would come along.\u201d<\/p>\n Jordi Fauli<\/p>\n JAMES BREEDEN FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n Work is still under way this month<\/p>\n JAMES BREEDEN FOR THE TIMES<\/p>\n Together, Arup and Fauli decided on a new approach. The original stone walls for the Sagrada Familia towers were 1.2m thick. They worked out that if they pre-squeezed them, inserting internal steel tendons under tension in a way that clamped the stones together to make panels, then they could still use stone, but get away with walls 30cm thick.<\/p>\n![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/\/7e45757e-6113-46aa-b45d-cd4647bea4fb.jpg\")
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