Imagine spending 43 years and your entire life on a building you know you will never see a quarter finished. This episode reads the biography of Antoni Gaudi through his magnum opus, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, beginning with bookseller Josep Maria Bocabella’s plan for an expiatory temple funded only by donations, the original Gothic revival design by Francisco de Paula del Villar, and the 31-year-old Gaudi taking over in 1883 and rewriting its DNA.

We explore his biomimicry: branching tree columns that replaced flying buttresses, twisting helicoidal geometry, turtles and chameleons at the Nativity facade, and a central Jesus spire capped at 172.5 meters so it would stay just shorter than Montjuic. We cover his death by tram in 1926, the 1936 destruction of his plaster models by anarchists, the decades of piecing shards back together, and the CAD, CNC and post-tensioned stone that finally caught up with his imagination. In this centenary year, we look at the central tower’s completion in February 2026, the papal blessing in June, the Orwell versus Sullivan debate, and the Glory facade dispute that could displace around 3,000 homes.

• Why Gaudi finished the joyful Nativity facade first and left the harsh Passion facade for later
• The wet-towel analogy for the intersecting geometric forms that make his columns so strong
• How a civil war fire nearly erased the roadmap for a century of construction
• Bead necklaces and steel cables: how post-tensioned stone panels sped up assembly
• Cathedral thinking and the question of planting seeds for a tree you will never sit under