The Sagrada Família Nativity Façade: The Door That Changed How I Saw It
A door. A doorway. A threshold.
There is something wonderfully deliberate about choosing to walk through one.
Standing in front of the Nativity Façade of the Sagrada Família, however, looking down is not your natural instinct.
Everything pulls your eyes upwards.
The towers. The stone. The almost impossible abundance of detail. Plants, animals, people and biblical stories seem to grow out of the building itself.
And somewhere amongst all of this, you have to remember that you actually came here to go inside.
So you pull your gaze down from the towers. You return your feet to the ground.
And you find a door.
It was this door, perhaps more than anything else on the Nativity Façade, that began to unlock the Sagrada Família for me.
A Gaudí Building Without a Gaudí Door
The Nativity Façade is particularly significant because it is the only one of the Sagrada Família's three great façades that was substantially constructed during Antoni Gaudí's lifetime.
Yet the doors I was standing in front of were not designed by Gaudí.
They were created more than a century later by Japanese sculptor Etsuro Sotoo.
That fascinated me.
Sotoo arrived in Barcelona in 1978 as a young sculptor, encountered the Sagrada Família and began working on the building. He would go on to devote decades of his life to understanding and continuing Gaudí's work.
But how do you complete the work of an architect who is no longer there to answer your questions?
How do you distinguish between imitation and interpretation?
Sotoo came to an extraordinary conclusion.
Instead of looking at Gaudí, he needed to try to look where Gaudí had looked.
And Gaudí had looked towards nature.
The bronze doors Sotoo eventually created for the Nativity Façade are therefore alive with leaves, flowers and insects. They don't feel applied to the architecture as decoration. They feel as though nature has simply continued growing across the entrance.
Standing there, I realised that I had been thinking about the Sagrada Família incorrectly.
I had thought of it as Gaudí's building.
It isn't.
Or perhaps, more accurately, it isn't only Gaudí's building.
Architecture Bigger Than Its Architect
Construction of the Sagrada Família began in 1882. Gaudí died in 1926.
And yet, a century after his death, architects, sculptors, engineers, craftspeople and builders are still working towards a vision that none of them originated.
That requires something architects aren't always famous for.
Letting go.
Architecture loves the idea of the singular genius. The architect with the sketchbook. The grand vision. The building attributed neatly to one name.
Buildings don't really happen that way.
They require collaboration.
Clients, architects, engineers, technologists, craftspeople, contractors and authorities all leave fingerprints on the eventual result.
The Sagrada Família simply stretches that collaboration across generations.
And perhaps that is why Sotoo's doors affected me so deeply.
They aren't Gaudí.
They shouldn't be.
They are the work of someone who took the time to understand the principles behind another person's vision deeply enough to contribute something new without losing the original story.
There is enormous humility in that.
The Architect Is Not the Building
It also made me think about our own work at We Do House Plans.
Obviously, there is quite a distance between completing the Sagrada Família and helping someone alter a family home in Pretoria.
But the principle isn't entirely different.
We very often work on houses designed by someone else.
A family has bought an existing home. Their needs have changed. Children arrived. Parents moved in. A patio became a room somewhere along the way. An alteration was built but never reflected on the approved building plans.
And now another architect enters the story.
The temptation would be to treat everything that came before as merely something to replace.
Good architecture asks something different: What was the original idea, and how can the next intervention respect it while allowing the building to continue living?
Sometimes our responsibility is to design.
Sometimes it is to correct.
Sometimes it is simply to listen carefully enough to understand what is already there.
Perhaps buildings are never really finished.
They pass from architect to architect, owner to owner, family to family.
Each generation adds something.
And Then, You Walk Through
I eventually did what doors are designed for.
I walked through.
From the extraordinary complexity of the Nativity Façade into an interior that I had seen hundreds of times in photographs and yet was completely unprepared to experience.
But that is another story.
For now, I keep returning to the threshold.
A Japanese sculptor.
A Catalan architect he never met.
A door completed generations after the original idea was conceived.
And an unfinished building somehow held together by a shared understanding of where to look.
Perhaps that is one of architecture's greatest lessons.
We don't always need to look at the person who came before us.
Sometimes we need to look where they were looking.
And then continue the story.
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