The Gaudí code

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1:07Silence is the first reaction. And most of the time I leave them to enter and admire the beauty of the interior. And most of them cry. And personally, I have been over a thousand times inside this building and still gives me chills. There is a place in my home city of Barcelona that has the power to overwhelm those who step inside. His work communicates many things. For the spiritual people, you can see some visitors even crying when they visit for the first time. But even though non-religious people are welcome and tend to be marveled by the beauty, So Gaudí has something for every sensibility, whether you are religious or not.

2:02When you arrive there, you feel immediately that something has happened in your heart. I have seen people remaining with no movements, just with an open mouth. So the Sagrada Familia opens you always to a new dimension. The world's tallest church, the Sagrada Familia, dominates the Barcelona skyline. I look at it every day from the window of my apartment. Its soaring towers and dazzling displays of light astonish the crowds. Some Billy Fitz creator, who died precisely 100 years ago, discovered a way to connect with a human soul that no architect has managed since. So what was Antónico de Secret?

2:49This is a documentary from the BBC World Service, and I'm just having it. In this edition of Heart and Soul, I'm in my home city, asking why 5 million people a year from very different religious and cultural backgrounds come to marvel at a European Catholic Church. How did Antonio Gaudí design a building that draws in the world? Well, once you get into this, I would say, marvelous living creature made of stone and light that appeals to all your senses and you feel like you feel part of it. What we see is a nave and many windows, all colorful, many, many, many, many windows. More colorful, more colors than I've ever seen in a church.

3:39You have to look up, up, up. You look up and then you feel this connection with everybody looking up, feeling a bit better, a bit taller, a bit elevated in their souls and bodies. All around me, under the forest of columns that branch out like trees, groups of tourists were gathering around guides, speaking languages from across the world.

4:09There are many paintings of the people of God, but on the shelf we can see this wall on the wall. Look, there are many paintings that we built in 1883. In the lower part we have the crick. The crick was started by Francisco de Paula del Villar in 1882. I'm finished by Antoni Gaudí. My name is Eduard Giu Las Marias and I'm from Barcelona. Yeah, I'm speaking Korean, my wife is Korean. I lived there for seven years. When they enter here and see that this holy place, they are really astonished. It's not only a tourist spot, but it's a place where you can find God. And Gaudi, there's Gaudi. I cannot know how to describe with words such a genius person.

4:53So they just sit here and they just enjoy the moment. And I think they like also to take photos. And I think they really enjoy the place. And not only Koreans, but Japanese and Chinese. There is a real connection between people from the Far East and this place. More than 10 % of the visitors last year came from South Korea and China.

5:19Outside the basilica, I found a young Korean couple having their wedding pictures taken. The photographer's assistant tells me that Korean weddings are very common here, with photo suits both before and after the ceremony, as well as on honeymoon.

5:38This meeting of East and West is the very essence of what Gaudí was striving for, a church for the world. Ah, yo me llamo Chiara, Chiara Curti. Chiara Curti is an Italian architect and the author of the book The Sagrada Familia, The Cathedral of Light. A mí siempre me encanta porque cuando tú vas a Sagrada Familia, casi siempre, o más veces en un día, encontrarás una pareja. Many people from all over the world, especially those from the East, visit the Sagrada Familia. I always love it because you almost always find a couple dressed in wedding attire, taking a photo either inside or outside the church.

6:20And often they aren't celebrating a Catholic wedding, but they do want the memory of their marriage to be captured in this very specific image. I don't think it's a fad. No, because many people say, well, Instagram is a fad. And I think it's really that the Asian world has a certain capacity for understanding care in a different way than we do. They have a way of caring for things. We see it in all their art. Gaudí is a profoundly Western, profoundly Christian man. But he also values this kind of art that can be understood by everyone because it goes to the origin of that spiritual need in people.

7:00That's not in a religious sense. He understands this need to have a transcendental connection, that whether you are from the East or the West, for everyone, it's a place where a person wants to live, like a little paradise, so to speak.

7:21For Barcelona tour guide Laura Koch, the connections with Japan go deeper still. The attraction of Asians to Gaudí is undeniable, yeah? I think that his creativity, the colors, the shapes, his respect for nature, as well as the use of materials are just a few reasons why Asian tourism is attracted by the constructive work of Antoni Gaudi. But I have to say, though, that the Japanese were the first ones to discover Antoni Gaudi. And two factors happened, two things happened in 1984, to be precise. And it's the fact that Hiroshi Tashihara made a beautiful visual documentary about the works of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona.

8:051984, this is before the Olympic Games. We always say as tour guides that the Olympic Games in 1992 marked a before and after in Barcelona's history. We were not really in the map of the world before 1992. And also in 1984, there was a commercial of a Japanese whiskey filmed in Paraguay, the interior of these Gaudi sites. And this is when Gaudi started to be famous in Japan. And they were the first ones to arrive before the Olympic Games. and eventually, of course, the Chinese and Korean market. They have been visiting Barcelona just now, just the last recent years. But the Japanese were the first one.

8:57And also the fact that Etsuro Soto, the chief sculptor of Sagrada Familia, arrived in 1978 and he never went by. Another Japanese arrival who never left is the architect Dr. Hiroya Tanaka. You came from Japan 20 years ago? 20? Oh, 20. No, 48. At his studio, he tells me he knew nothing about Gaudí when he came to Barcelona, with a group of architects nearly half a century ago. After falling in love with Gaudí's work, he has stayed here ever since. Why Gaudí is so popular in Japan? Why? Why they came, you guys, you came by thousands to see Gaudí's work? Pure art. Pure art. ¿Es la conexión con la naturaleza?

9:51Sí, porque los japoneses ya sabemos que... Okay, so when you saw Gaudí, you thought that the connection with nature was more or less the same like Japanese have. I mean, you guys, you have. You are connected with nature and you're... Sintoism. Sintoism and Gaudí had some kind of connection. Yes, but not precisely religiously, you know? It's not about religion. It's about nature, connection with nature. The way Gaudí depicts nature. That's why they came by thousands. Because the majority of the Japanese didn't understand. So, Europeans, we have missed connection with nature. But the Japanese always have it.

10:42Because they live in constant contact with nature and talking to nature. And the Japanese found it suddenly in Gaudí's work. And Gaudí's had this connection with nature, right? And he has that connection. Yes. that made him universal. And this is where it got a little bit down, Brown, a little bit Da Vinci code. Dr. Tanaka told me there were hidden meanings within Gaudí's work that were still to be discovered. He found codes, secret codes, when he was depicting works of Gaudí. he found secret codes in the stones. He made his PhD on Gaudí in Barcelona University, same as Gaudí was architect, studied architecture.

11:42And so he found how many? 250 codes, secret codes. That was his PhD thesis that we can see here. It's a very thick book.

12:02And last year he found 600 more codes. The meaning of code, it's not a figure, it's not a number. What is it about? What is it? Secret. It's about secret connections. And you found the secret connections of Gaudí's nature. Exactly. And you describe them. Yes. Eso quiere decir que sentido de cada uno que tienes. But absolutely fascinating. He says that we all, we have an inner code, and that is about finding it. And Gaudí's work was delivering those codes, and he's finding them and trying to reveal to the world and to himself. Sí, por ejemplo, los artes. Artists, they deliver codes. sometimes without knowing that they are doing so.

12:58But it's very complicated to interpret them and to find the meaning, the secret meaning, and that's his work. You are listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service with me, Yui Samiget. I want to put all the issues on the table that keep me up at night. The interview brings you conversations with the people shaping our world. From global leaders. I've much more than fulfilled the promises that I've made. To cultural icons. I'm just interested in how it feels to be playing songs that are 50 odd years old. Songs are like children. They're with you forever. The interview from the BBC World Service.

13:41Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I am Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev. The leader of the Soviet Union in 1962. And I'm Max Kennedy, the nephew of U.S.

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14:51As the Sagrada Familia prepares to mark 100 years since Antonio Gaudí's death, I'm looking into how this Spanish church became a global phenomenon. I'm standing outside the stunning nativity facade. It's alive with symbolism from the natural world. We can see here plenty of animals. We see pigeons and donkey. There are different scenes from the Bible. Oh, dog, a little dog here. It's a dog, a very nice dog, cute. We can see sheep. Is that a chicken or a chicken? Voila, plenty of flowers. Gaudí was so committed to making his stonework as realistic as possible that he recruited local people as real-life models.

15:40Schoolchildren, pilgrims, construction workers, even steel-born babies from the hospital. They were used for the scene from the Bible of Herod's Massacre of the Innocents. Gaudí captured all their likenesses in plaster cuts. Animals too. Turkeys, chicken and geese from the neighboring farms were encased in plaster. Even a live donkey that was winged up and suspended high in the air. Jordi Faulí is the chief architect of the Sagrada Familia. He didn't want to copy the nature. He had the nature as a space to discover forms, to discover structures, in order to convert these structures, these forms, in geometry and in architecture.

16:28The central portal of the nativity facade, it's finished with a cypress in the top. A cypress put in the top of a portal. A tree, right. The first time in the history of architecture, no? a tree, a Cyprus, that express the love of God to the people. In fact, you find trees throughout the interior of the building. Here's tour guide Laura Koch. One of the things Gaudi said, and I quote, a tree is actually a building, yeah? So we have the columns that look like the trunk, yeah? The base is like the trunk. And then the branches, the columns are branching out like if they were branches. They are the buttresses actually holding the weight.

17:14And then you can see on the ceiling it's like the leaves and the light comes through. There are no straight lines because there are no straight lines in nature. So everything is curving, waving and the geometry as well. Gaudí was inspired by natural shapes like bones and shells and honeycombs. So you can see all that reflected into his architecture. Gaudí often spoke of nature as his greatest teacher, the ultimate master of design. He described it as the great book, always open in which we should make an effort to read. Outside of the city, at the industrial village of Colonia Way, also designed by Gaudí, I pay a visit to the headquarters of the Gaudí Research Institute and its founder, Pere Jordi Figueroa.

18:07He shows me all sorts of Gaudi treasures, pencil sketches, models of buildings, and some of the tools he designed himself. Gaudi talked on all sorts of commissions that would change the fabric of Barcelona. Not just churches, houses, and parks, but street furniture, too. Lamp posts, and even payments we still walk on today. Here we got the floor of the... Este es el primer y único modelo que queda entero. I didn't know it was Gaudí's work. Anyone who comes to Barcelona work on Gaudí's design. It's funny. I have recognized it instinctively. Like, here we are. This is our floor, right? And it was made by Gaudí.

18:54Didn't know that. Pere Jordi wanted to talk to me about how Gaudí was inspired by an idea from Marx that would become known as fractal theory. It describes how patterns repeat in nature on different scales over and over again. Once again, Gaudí was well ahead of his time. Fractals. So fractals were thought by Gaudí since he was a child. And fractals reproduced the world, the nature. So probably we find here the mathematical connection. Gaudí, desde pequeño, vio que la natura, la normalidad es lo más perfecto.

19:56I can feel, I can perceive this talk with nature through geometry. Something of us is in there, in every curve. That's why you see it and say, yeah, it's appealing to me. It's appealing to something in my inner life. And the main question here is how is possible that 150 years ago, and isolated architect in a small village in Reus that came to Barcelona later, but how he could think in advance what a fractal was and use it, applicate it to actual practical architecture. We talked earlier in the program about the strong connection between Gaudí and the Far East. Here in the Gaudí Research Institute, there were more signs of those links.

20:47Only the day before our visit, the government of Shanghai in China had sent a delegation to learn more about Gaudí's work. The Chinese had already used principles of his designs in dozens of their hospitals. And Pereyordi told me that, of all the students studying the Gaudí architecture course at the University of Barcelona, 90 % were from China. He speculated that it wouldn't be long before the Chinese built their own replica of the Sagrada Familia. The fascination of the Faris with his architect from Catalonia continues. One of the best photographers, Ada, who actually was a Japanese, came in the 60s to take pictures of Gaudí's work.

21:37He put the camera in front of the building and when he was going to leave, he couldn't. And he just put the camera in front of Gaudí's masterworks. And when it was about time to push the button, he couldn't. Because the impact that he transmitted, the spiritual... The cultural crush that he had, he couldn't overcome it. And he couldn't just push the button. But not everyone has been glowing with praise for the building that now dominates the Barcelona skyline. In the 60s, a petition was drawn up against the Sagrada Familia. It said, In the cities of today, such a big monumental temple has no sense.

22:23And, The Sagrada Familia cannot be continued because there are no drawings. It went on. Anything done further is improvisation. Nobody really respecting Gaudí's work can cooperate on this mess. The organiser was a young man called Oscar Tusquets, still living in Barcelona today. It was 1964. I was finishing my studies. I was one of the promoters of a well-known manifesto against the continuity of the works in La Sagrada Familia. And this manifesto was, well, was signed by Le Corbusier, Alvarado, all the... Big shots in architecture at the time. Le Corbusier. Also the progressist Catholics saying, oh, a big cathedral has no sense, no.

23:20And we were convinced of this. And, well, the important reason was that there were not documents, precise documents to continue the works. For two reasons. One, because Gaudí was improvising. Improvising. Improvising all the time. And after the Spanish War, they destroyed a big, big mall, very precise. They destroyed these documents. and, well, we were convinced that, you know, there was enough talent to continue this. But one day, a friend architect said, you are wrong. La Sagrada Familia is the best building of the 20th century. I go with you. I go with you and we visit. And we were together.

24:13We were in contact with all the people working there, Japanese, full of Japanese. And we go out 60 meters from the ground floor. I thought that it was fantastic. And at this moment, I make a writing, an article, that was published in El País, saying how we were so wrong, no? Very good translation, sir. ¿Cómo pudimos equivocarnos tanto, no? The documents were not necessary because the geometry was so clear. 20 years ago, people were saying Gaudí was a cake maker. Bad taste, bad taste. Yeah, tacky. It was tacky, two colors, too many colors, kitsch, kitsch. But I say a lot of artists are near the kitsch.

25:10Wagner, for example. Yes, good point. Gaudí, Dali, a close friend of mine. A big artist that touched the kitchen. I am convinced it's something great, unique. So you are a convert believer. Absolutely, absolutely. Really going high. In the Sagrada Familia, it took a trip up in a small lift, climbing high inside one of the many towers. Now we are getting into the lift, which is a work lift, and it sounds, to be honest, I feel a bit scared, but, I mean, not confident. Chief architect Jordi Fowli wanted to show me some of the colorful decorations of fruits at the top of the spars. Wow, the views are magnificent.

26:04Yeah, here we are. Here we are at 55 metres above the main nave and with the vision of the towers, of the Nativity Towers, the Passion Towers and the Central Towers. We can see here two evangelists, the Central Tower of Jesus Christ. May I be a bit, not disrespectful, but a bit joyful, I would say it looks like a bit of theme park. I mean, it's so gorgeous, it's so colourful, it's so wow. I mean, it's like, I wouldn't say Disney World, but it's like a garden, I mean like children's garden, kindergarten. But of course, much more quality. This case represents the fruit of the Eucharistite. and we can see wheat.

26:59Wow. Wheat, no? Yeah. Wheat and grapes. Black grapes. Grapes, white grapes, and the other spies are the wits, no? Wits. The wheat. Oh, yeah, the wheat. Wow. But it looks like... The bread of the priest. Yeah, it looks like toys, right? The wind of the priest. Yeah. No, for example, he built this tower, the Bernabe Tower, in his last month. He finished that. All life, right. Also with gold colors. Yes. But the colors are never seen before in Catholic Church. Never. No. No, probably, probably. Not in the top. In the top elements. No. Yes. He wanted to build a church also with life. And the color is life.

27:53Any secrets or secret codes? In Gaudi's work? No. Messages? Secret? No. I think he wanted to communicate a lot of things, but he wanted that his architecture will communicate clearly messages. Gaudi explained, in the future will come people from around the world to see what we are doing. He was building a Catholic church, but he was building also a church open to all people, different religions, different countries, a space to contemplation, a space to be elevated, and also a space to be near God. He made this invitation to all people from around the world. A summer of celebrations is planned at the Sagrada Familia to mark the completion of the Tower of Jesus Christ.

28:52But there are years of work still to do before the final facade, the glory facade, will be complete. And the designers of this new entrance will have to decipher for themselves the secrets that lie behind the Gaudi Code.