The Church has agreed to pay €22m to fund transport upgrades under a deal with Barcelona Council so that, more than a century after its first stone was laid, and 92 years after its famously ascetic architect was fatally struck by a tram, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is finally getting its paperwork in order.
The Guardian writes:
A deal between the church’s trustees and the city council means the project, on which construction began in 1882, will be granted a building licence for the first time. Antoni Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece is Barcelona’s most visited tourist site, attracting 20 million visitors to the area each year. But until Thursday it had lacked the proper permissions.
The new agreement will formalise the building works and pave the way for a plan ‘to study the urban solutions in order to finish Antoni Gaudí’s project’, the city council said. The deal includes schemes to improve public transport and the surrounding area. The Sagrada Familia will pay €22m (£19.3m) to help underwrite the city’s transport network, including €7m to improve accessibility on the Barcelona metro system. Four million euros will be invested in renovating four major thoroughfares and €3m will be for keeping streets safe and clean….
Work on the Sagrada Familia began in March 1882, based on a neo-gothic design by the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar y Lozano. When he resigned shortly afterwards, Gaudí stepped in with perhaps his most famously idiosyncratic design. The church quickly became the life’s work of the Catalan architect….
Gaudí’s collaborator Domènec Sugrañes took over the project, adhering to Gaudí’s original concept. During the Spanish civil war the studio workshop burned down and original plans, drawings, photographs and models were destroyed, but the work went on…
