What’s a Roof if You’ve Got a Dream?

Seventy years after the death of the man who designed the Sagrada Familia cathedral, his most famous work still lacks a roof.

Not to worry. Those carrying forward one of the most exotic construction projects of modern times say that--with luck and a lot of money--the cathedral will be completed in only another half-century, more or less.

Its spires topped by plant-like shapes or covered with glazed ceramics and looking like giant lollipops, the Sagrada Familia (Holy Family) cathedral is a monument to fantastic dreams and perseverance.

Designed by architect Antoni Gaudi, famous for incorporating nature’s designs into his work, the cathedral dominates the Barcelona skyline, and the lives of a mystical Japanese sculptor and an architect whose father literally picked up the pieces of the project in 1936.

Gaudi, who died in 1926 after being struck by a trolley, never expected the cathedral to be completed in his lifetime. Building began in 1882; only one facade was finished when he died 44 years later.

The project, along with Gaudi’s charts and scale models, was handed over to another architect.

But in 1936, as civil war engulfed Spain, an anti-clerical mob stormed into the Sagrada Familia, burned the design plans and smashed plaster models of the project.

Architect Lluis Bonet helped remove the shards and painstakingly reconstructed the models. Today, they are used as a guide for converting Gaudi’s dream into reality. It is being built around his remains--the architect is entombed in the cathedral.

Bonet’s son, Jordi Bonet, is now overseeing the project.

“It’s an extraordinary job,” he said. “When I was offered it, I had doubts because it’s such a challenge.”

The project, which in 1995 cost $3.2 million, is financed by private donations and visitor entrance fees.

Sculptures are perched on the cathedral. Some show Christ’s crucifixion with distorted and nightmarish faces.

Some critics say that Gaudi wouldn’t have wanted the sculptures, and that work on the cathedral should never have proceeded after the design plans were destroyed.

“I would leave it exactly as Gaudi left it . . . as a testimony of something that could have been, but was not,” said Antoni de Moragas, a Barcelona architect who believes Gaudi’s followers are misinterpreting what he intended.

But Etsuro Sotoo, one of two sculptors on the project, says he is able to think as Gaudi did after long study of the architect’s works, and senses Gaudi’s presence as he chisels into a block of granite.

“Gaudi always accompanies me,” said Sotoo, a native of Fukuoka, Japan. “Of course he is dead. But for me, a rock is like a time machine. Through the rock I can ask Gaudi questions, and he answers me. The rock itself answers me.”

The half-completed Sagrada Familia is, along with St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York, one of the longest-running construction projects under way in the world today.

As an endless procession of tourists chattering in Japanese, Italian and other languages strolled through the cathedral on a recent sunny day, a yellow crane hoisted building materials to workers on scaffolding high in the air.

They were working on a roof over the nave--a major stage in the project that is expected to be completed within two years.

Alvin Botting, a tourist from Barkway, England, was amazed that so much money and effort were being poured into pursuing one man’s fancy without any hope of making money off it.

“This place has no value in a practical sense, but it is fantastic,” he said. “It’s probably one of the most exciting projects going on in the world today.”

The work is being speeded up by technology. A computer-guided saw can chisel a granite column in one-sixth the time it would take by hand.

Still, the cathedral probably won’t be completed in Bonet’s and Sotoo’s lifetimes either.

Others will have to inherit the task of turning a grandiose dream into reality.